--Doug
On 10/9/06, Jochen Fromm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.
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Doug Roberts, RTI International
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