41,453 research outputs found

    Evolutionary Neural Gas (ENG): A Model of Self Organizing Network from Input Categorization

    Full text link
    Despite their claimed biological plausibility, most self organizing networks have strict topological constraints and consequently they cannot take into account a wide range of external stimuli. Furthermore their evolution is conditioned by deterministic laws which often are not correlated with the structural parameters and the global status of the network, as it should happen in a real biological system. In nature the environmental inputs are noise affected and fuzzy. Which thing sets the problem to investigate the possibility of emergent behaviour in a not strictly constrained net and subjected to different inputs. It is here presented a new model of Evolutionary Neural Gas (ENG) with any topological constraints, trained by probabilistic laws depending on the local distortion errors and the network dimension. The network is considered as a population of nodes that coexist in an ecosystem sharing local and global resources. Those particular features allow the network to quickly adapt to the environment, according to its dimensions. The ENG model analysis shows that the net evolves as a scale-free graph, and justifies in a deeply physical sense- the term gas here used.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

    A New Theory of Consciousness: The Missing Link - Organization

    Get PDF
    What is consciousness and what is the missing link between the sensory input and the cortical centre in the brain for consciousness? In the literature there are more than a million pages written about consciousness. The perspectives range from the field of metaphysics to those of quantum mechanics. However, no one today has produced a theory which is universally accepted. Consciousness is “something” which the majority of humans know that they posses, they use it when they want to understand their environment. However, no individual human knows whether other humans also posses consciousness. unless some tests such as she is looking at me, he is talking etc., are performed. We are caught in an intellectual sort of recursive carousel – we need consciousness to understand consciousness. To understand consciousness we have to understand the mechanism of its function, which is to effectively organize sensory inputs from our environment. Consciousness is the outcome of the process of organizing these sensory inputs. This implies that organization is an act which precedes consciousness. Since every activity in nature is to organize/disorganize, what is the element which compels this action? I am proposing that just like energy is the physical element that causes action, there is another physical element I have called it NASCIUM which has the capacity to cause organization. This is the missing link. Understanding the nature of organization, i.e. nascium, will enhance our capability to understand consciousness

    Towards homeostatic architecture: simulation of the generative process of a termite mound construction

    Get PDF
    This report sets out to the theme of the generation of a ‘living’, homeostatic and self-organizing architectural structure. The main research question this project addresses is what innovative techniques of design, construction and materials could prospectively be developed and eventually applied to create and sustain human-made buildings which are mostly adaptive, self-controlled and self-functioning, without option to a vast supply of materials and peripheral services. The hypothesis is that through the implementation of the biological building behaviour of termites, in terms of collective construction mechanisms that are based on environmental stimuli, we could achieve a simulation of the generative process of their adaptive structures, capable to inform in many ways human construction. The essay explicates the development of the 3-dimensional, agent-based simulation of the termite collective construction and analyzes the results, which involve besides physical modelling of the evolved structures. It finally elucidates the potential of this emerging and adaptive architectural performance to be translated to human practice and thus enlighten new ecological engineering and design methodologies

    A Stochastic Approach to Shortcut Bridging in Programmable Matter

    Full text link
    In a self-organizing particle system, an abstraction of programmable matter, simple computational elements called particles with limited memory and communication self-organize to solve system-wide problems of movement, coordination, and configuration. In this paper, we consider a stochastic, distributed, local, asynchronous algorithm for "shortcut bridging", in which particles self-assemble bridges over gaps that simultaneously balance minimizing the length and cost of the bridge. Army ants of the genus Eciton have been observed exhibiting a similar behavior in their foraging trails, dynamically adjusting their bridges to satisfy an efficiency trade-off using local interactions. Using techniques from Markov chain analysis, we rigorously analyze our algorithm, show it achieves a near-optimal balance between the competing factors of path length and bridge cost, and prove that it exhibits a dependence on the angle of the gap being "shortcut" similar to that of the ant bridges. We also present simulation results that qualitatively compare our algorithm with the army ant bridging behavior. Our work gives a plausible explanation of how convergence to globally optimal configurations can be achieved via local interactions by simple organisms (e.g., ants) with some limited computational power and access to random bits. The proposed algorithm also demonstrates the robustness of the stochastic approach to algorithms for programmable matter, as it is a surprisingly simple extension of our previous stochastic algorithm for compression.Comment: Published in Proc. of DNA23: DNA Computing and Molecular Programming - 23rd International Conference, 2017. An updated journal version will appear in the DNA23 Special Issue of Natural Computin
    corecore