Principles for Engineered Emergence (slides)

Abstract

Principles for Engineered EmergenceIt is difficult to establish engineering control over the behavior ofaggregates of unreliable devices with complicated interactionpatterns. I take a linguistic view of this problem, searching formechanisms that simplify the composition and abstraction ofcomplicated behaviors. From my work on various problems of aggregatecontrol in cognitive architectures and spatial computing, I havenoticed common themes in mechanisms that solve them. From these, Iextract four principles which seem to help in engineering robustaggregate behavior---self-scaling, sparseness, gradual degradation,and failure simplification---and give examples of how they can beexploited.