I just came back from a 3-day Summer School on self-organization here in Germany. Although it was about self-organization in general, and the participants were coming from all major German universities, nearly every member of the Summer School except myself was involved in developing software for WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks), mostly with simulations (using ns-2) or real hardware, mainly with German ESB nodes, see http://www.scatterweb.net/research_products/esb.en.html
There were also surprisingly few discussions about the definitions of self-organization or emergence. On the one hand this is a positive thing, since these discussions are always a bit like the debates at the first councils. At the first council of Nicaea for example, convoked by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 325, there was a debate if the Son is of the same substance as the Father, or if they are only of similar substance. It is the kind of problem you meet if you treat abstract concepts in a wrong way as terms for concrete things. These debates appear from a practical point of view often as irrelevant, meaningless and unnecessary. On the other hand I think that there is more to self-organization than sensor-networks, although sensor networks are probably typical examples of systems that need self-organization: systems that are very small or very large, very distributed or very remote, etc. Yet even in sensor-networks real self-organization - which is so badly needed - is more a wish than a reality. Popular algorithms (for instance routing protocols like AODV and DSR) are often only as simple as possible and rely on flooding without any spectacular form of self-organization. Concrete attempts to realize self-organization in WSNs usually end in a cramp. All participants for instance agreed that complicated algorithms to determine the topology of large sensor networks would probably never work in practice, see the Video "Geometry-Based Reasoning for a Large Sensor Network" at http://www.math.tu-bs.de/~ali/fk-geometry-mpeg4v2.avi (attention, quite large - 113 MB - but still worth it) So what do you think ? Are self-organization and sensor-networks synonymous ? Is it the best area to realize self-organization, or just another example where self-organization is hard to achieve ? -J. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
