Ledface – The Iceberg

We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts. — Philip Warren Anderson

For centuries we’ve been told that biology is nothing more than chemistry and physics. The reductionist model further simplifies complexity by dividing the problem into simpler parts and taking as a premise the idea that “the whole is the sum of its parts”.

Although reductionism has been popular for centuries, it just doesn’t fit the life sciences and many other complex situations. For these systems we have “holism” (from the Greek word for whole or entire) which proposes that the whole is actually more than the sum of its parts.

When you reduce, you may discard the very thing you are looking for. — Monica Anderson

The definition of intelligence is a controversial matter, but no matter which way you look at it, intelligence is an irreducible, multi-dimensional system. Furthermore, if you take a Cartesian split approach toward intelligence, you’d be ignoring collective properties that arise from the properties of parts.

Let’s discuss some concepts involved in Ledface’s project.

Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence (CI) systems are complex by nature, and you don’t have to understand them as the sum of a certain group’s intelligence but, rather, the intelligence that emerges from it. The nature of this “emergent” behavior is different from the sum of agent parts, and it’s the reason why there are perfectly balanced ecosystems in nature or swarming behavior in many animal species.

A glimpse of human collective intelligence can be seen in Wikipedia. In 2001, few anticipated that it would become the most popular, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia in the world. Does Wikipedia have powerful algorithms that quickly remove false or misleading information? No, the reliability comes from its collective intelligence.

Swarm Intelligence

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is a scientific field of CI that looks at the behavior of these species and seeks to understand how does collective intelligence emerges. Consider the cathedral mound produced by a colony of termites that stand up to 30 ft tall.  Although there is a queen, she doesn’t give direct orders, and she doesn’t manage the termites’ tasks.  How is this possible?  There is no centralized organization, but the emergent properties of the termite’s collective intelligence produces a dazzling feat of engineering.  Fascinatingly the termite’s process of building the mound appears disorganized, but SI analysis has found order in the seeming chaos.

Of course human beings are not termites, but the Internet is providing opportunities for what we call, “collective brains” to emerge like mounds of intelligence.  When intelligence is given a suitable environment it swarms together in a process of emergence. What this means for us as humans is quite extraordinary.  What is needed are unique social environments like Ledface, that evoke the potential of each individual’s role in this process of emergence. Physicist Doyne Farmer wrote of emergence, “It’s not magic, but it feels like magic”.

The termites communicate with each other, but not directly—they interact through the environment by stigmergy.

Stigmergy

Stigmergy is a kind of environmental sinergy, an indirect communication through the environment between self-organized agents. It’s intimately related to the concept that cues are information or metadata embedded in the stigmergy structure to be read and reread many times.

A lamppost covered by CD packaging stickers, outside a Best Buy location A wide variety of musical genres and time periods were present, and no other post in the lot had a CD sticker — Mike Davis

The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity. —Vitorino Ramos

Although stigmergic behavior was first observed in social insects, it’s not restricted to physical systems. It’s also present in computational environments that are strongly embedded in a social environment. Wikipedia is an example of a collective project wherein users interact only by modifying local parts of their shared virtual environment.

Emergence

Emergence is all the properties we assign to a system that are actually properties of the relationship between a system and its environment. It requires some form of “interaction”, and it’s not simply a matter of scale.

The “emergent” is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable and cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference. In other words, if the properties of the whole can be calculated from the parts and their interactions, it is not emergence.

Our Vision

Why shouldn’t we believe that human beings can also enable the emergence of collective intelligence? Although emergence does not have logical properties and cannot be predicted, for us, this endeavor is about designing a model that combines the right elements already demonstrated in swarm intelligence and complex systems research in order to produce a near propitious environment that allows human collective intelligence to emerge. We will call it a “collective brain” when, at some point, the system becomes more than its individual parts (us).

You may ask, “Why has this not been done before”? Well, how many termites are needed to build a cathedral mound? Put 100 termites together and they won’t create a “mini” mound. Emergence involves a process, and with the Internet and social networks, large numbers of human beings can now interact without necessarily being physically present. Although this is just one of the ingredients for emergence, it’s only now that we have this capability in place.

We are working on Ledface’s algorithm to make sure that we have the right enabling properties so CI may emerge and show a global-local behaviour (emergence moves from the local to global aggregation level).

Finally we ask, if tiny, simple termites can collectively engineer a masterpiece,  what might we – human beings – create?   The internet and social networks have enabled us to accomplish amazing feats, but we’ve yet to collectively harness their true potential.  We at Ledface aspire to provide the optimum conditions for large numbers of individuals to amplify their collective brainpower and produce masterpieces that inspire us to live our lives to the fullest.

Help us build a new kind of intelligence.

I believe that imagination, and especially collective imagination, produces reality. — Pierre Lévy

Some of the authors who have inspired us include Edsger W. Dijkstra, Martijn Schut, Monica Anderson, Peter Corning, Pierre Lévy, Robert MacKay, Vitorino Ramos and Yaneer Bar-Yam. Many thanks to them and others.

Tip of the Iceberg: click the image to see a more straight to the point version