On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 8:34 AM Abdulrahman Semrie <[email protected]>
wrote:
> > I think it's a mistake to try to think of a distributed atomspace as
> one super-giant, universe-filling uniform, undifferentiated blob of storage.
>
> It is not clear to me why this is a mistake.
>
The mention of "quorum-sensing in bacteria" is not entirely spurious. The
way that quorum sensing works is that a bacterium emits small polypeptides,
which other bacteria can sense (i.e. can "smell"). The local strength of
the "smell" provides feedback to bacteria as to how many neighbors it has.
This can be used to perform computing; for example, in slime-molds, it is
used to solve the two-armed bandit problem (the exploit-vs-explore problem
- google it, it's fun). Turns out that tree-roots, shrubs, etc. use this
technique as well.
The problem with this technique is it's slow -- rate-limited by diffusion,
and high-cross-talk -- everybody smells everything, messages interfere with
one-another. The jellyfish solves this problem by inventing the neuron.
The neuron is a Star Trek teleporter, a Star Gate for small polypeptides.
Except now we call them neuro-transmitters, not polypeptides. So, the
polypeptide walks into a star-gate, and is instantly transported (about a
millisecond) to a location a few inches, a few feet away -- this is 5-10
orders of magnitude faster than diffusion. And there's no cross-talk --
the shielding around a neuron means that nothing leaks out of the axon --
the star-gates are located at the dendrites, only. Message transmission is
clean, no interference. High-fidelity.
Neurons partition themselves off into local groupings. They only talk to
peers. There is no every-to-every connection. Yes, sometimes neurons grow
new connections, or drop old ones, but this is slow. This partitioning has
a huge data-processing advantage over the universe-filling undifferentiated
blob of bacteria or slime-mold.
If you want to have 2-3 or 5 or 10 or 20 atomspaces talk to each-other
about genomic data, that is fine. But don't ask those atomspaces to also
store robot data, and language-processing data, and face-recognition data.
Partition them off into a group of peers who are interested only in
genomics. They don't need to process those atoms that say that Sophia just
moved her arm, or that Sophia heard a round of applause after her speech at
some conference at the opposite end of the planet. There is absolutely no
need for that.
What there is a need for is to find out who's doing what. So, if I have a
new robot-dancing algorithm, I want to find those Sophias with the newer
shoulder-joint designs, and talk to those atomspaces. The
who-has-got-what-where info can be published in a global index, a
universally-shared lookup table. e.g. IPFS. So this is like bit-torrent --
whatever content you want, you look it up in the global DHT, but then, to
actually download on bit-torrent, you only talk to the local peers who
actually have that data, You don't talk to the entire universe.
So here -- you look up to see who's got the genomic data you want, and you
talk to just them. And if, for example, you recently imported a newer
cell-ontology, or a new copy of some other bio dataset, you publish that,
like bit-torrent, so that other atomspaces can find it, and connect, and
download.
-- Linas
--
Verbogeny is one of the pleasurettes of a creatific thinkerizer.
--Peter da Silva
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