Re: Paper by ~MM on distributed self-awareness


Stephen Harris wrote:
<minsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1146372511.628418.228860@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Yes. I have trouble both with 'emergence' and 'self-aware,' because
they are both sloppy, commonsensical terms that tend to keep people
from thinking in more detail. I've recently posted chapter 9 on the
concept of Self; see the links to "The Emotion Machine" chapters on my
home page. Just as I see many meanings for 'consciousness' in chapter
4, I see many meanings for 'self-aware,' and Melanie Mitchell is wise
to avoid such terms.

I think the use of the terms self-adaptive, self-managing, self-healing,
self-organizing and self-configuring in relation to describing computer
behavior in network software is widespread.



I keep trying to tell you ... the usage you give here is no problem.
From Webster, "self-" simply means of oneself or itself, the object or
subject of the action.

The problem is specifically in use of the term "self-aware", as this is
most commonly used in regards consciousness and other psychological
concepts.

Why do you keep failing to see the distinction?



319,000 hits on Google for Self-adaptive systems 614,000 for self-managing
I think this is already like Paul Halmos and his crusade to use "proper
value"
rather eigenvalue. The controversy has passed.

Paul Robertson [MIT] :: "A self-adaptive system is a system that
continually (at runtime) monitors its success in achieving its
intended goal. When the system is found to be doing poorly the
systems modifies itself in an attempt to do better at its assigned
task. A self-adaptive system presupposes that there are multiple
ways of achieving the same task and that in some contexts one
method may be better suited than another."

www-sop.inria.fr/oasis/Nikos.Parlavantzas/publications/blairwoss02.pdf
ABSTRACT
"There is a growing interest in the area of self-healing systems.
Self-healing does however impose considerable demands on
system infrastructures -- especially in terms of openness and
support for reconfigurability.
This paper proposes that the self-awareness inherent in reflective
technologies lends itself well to the construction of self-healing systems."

SH: IBM uses self-adaptive system to mean the system reacts
to dynamic changes and provides a solution _as if_ a human
were fixing it, solutions can be quite similar. They don't mean
the computer is conscious. That idea is so far removed that
they don't even bother to clarify it. The terms refer to similar
outputs/solutions, not the inner machinery which accomplishes it.

doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/DEXA.2004.1333561
"Natural Inspiration for Self-Adaptive Systems"

"The emergent behaviour of autonomic systems, together with the scale of
their deployment, impedes prediction of the full range of configuration
and failure scenarios; thus it is not possible to devise management and
recovery strategies to cover all possible outcomes. One solution to this
problem is to embed self-managing and self-healing abilities into such
applications. Traditional design approaches favour determinism, even when
unnecessary. This can lead to conflicts between the non-functional
requirements. Natural systems such as ant colonies have evolved cooperative,
finely tuned emergent behaviours which allow the colonies to function at
very large scale and to be very robust, although non-deterministic. Simple
pheromone-exchange communication systems are highly efficient and are a
major contribution to their success. This paper proposes that we look to
natural systems for inspiration when designing architecture and
communications strategies, and presents an election algorithm which
encapsulates non-deterministic behaviour to achieve high scalability,
robustness and stability."

SH: Melanie compared the immune system, ant colonies and software,
Copycat. This paper above is doing the same thing.

www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/able/ftp/woss04/presentations/session1/hawthorne.pdf
Exploiting Architectural Prescriptions for Self-Managing, Self-Adaptive
Systems:

"Automatic reconfiguration
->Reflection (self-awareness)
->Loosely coupled component architectures (e.g., component-connector,
service provider architectures)"

SH: She is talking about systems which have "no boss" accomplishing
"goals" which one would assume had a boss. The use of the term
self-awareness is defined by her to avoid confusion, has no hint of
human-like consciousness/ego, and is consistent with current literature.
Copycat is a program that solves human cognitive/analogy problems.

I grant that there are still some in the AI field who beat a dead horse,
and they mean self-aware to include conscious; but they make it
clear what they mean by that term too, by asking questions like:

"What behaviors might a self-aware system be capable of that
are not possible for a non-self-aware system?"

Regards,
Stephen

.

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