4 research outputs found
The Role of Conditional Independence in the Evolution of Intelligent Systems
Systems are typically made from simple components regardless of their
complexity. While the function of each part is easily understood, higher order
functions are emergent properties and are notoriously difficult to explain. In
networked systems, both digital and biological, each component receives inputs,
performs a simple computation, and creates an output. When these components
have multiple outputs, we intuitively assume that the outputs are causally
dependent on the inputs but are themselves independent of each other given the
state of their shared input. However, this intuition can be violated for
components with probabilistic logic, as these typically cannot be decomposed
into separate logic gates with one output each. This violation of conditional
independence on the past system state is equivalent to instantaneous
interaction --- the idea is that some information between the outputs is not
coming from the inputs and thus must have been created instantaneously. Here we
compare evolved artificial neural systems with and without instantaneous
interaction across several task environments. We show that systems without
instantaneous interactions evolve faster, to higher final levels of
performance, and require fewer logic components to create a densely connected
cognitive machinery.Comment: Original Abstract submitted to the GECCO conference 2017 Berli
Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud
Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp