Nobody knows until someone does the experiment. It is certainly possible that something interesting will happen once enough agents are simulated together. Right now it is a challenging task just to scale the simulations up.
Cheers On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 11:43:27AM +0200, Jochen Fromm wrote: > > Besides the technical issues, what is the advantage of > parallel agent-based simulations ? Can you achieve more > with a billion agents than with a few thousand, or is it > just an attractive-sounding possibility ? An ant colony > with a billion ants will not be significantly different > or more intelligent than a colony with 10.000 ants. A swarm > with 10.000 birds will look similar to a swarm with 100 > birds, only a bit more fine-grained. > > Is a simulation with millions or billions of agents somehow > qualitative different from a simulation with only a few > thousand agents ? Certainly not if they are all alike, if > they all do the same or if they all "live" in the same > environment. I looks very difficult to construct a billion > different agents or to assign different tasks to billions > of agents. > > In evolutionary systems, AI, and ALife, scale certainly > matters: a typical human brain has billions of neurons, > a chromosome contains roughly a GByte program with a > billion bytes, and evolution on Earth took from the > earliest forms to the computer nerd today a few billion > years. If we expect something interesting in an evolutionary > ALife system, do we have to let it run for some billion years > using a billion agents in order to get a "genetic code" > with a billion bytes ? > > I bet the first true AI will have more than a billion bytes > of code, too (already a few films take easily a few GByte of > data). Somehow the lower bound for interesting behavior seems > to be a billion interacting units - why is this so ? > > -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 -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ 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
