Distributing a Mind on the Internet: The World-Wide-Mind

• Authors: Mark Humphrys
• Venue: ECAL '01 Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Advances in Artificial Life
• Year: 2001

It is proposed that researchers in AI and ALife construct their agent minds and agent worlds as servers on the Internet. Under this scheme, not only will 3rd parties be able to re-use agent worlds in their own projects (a long-standing aim of other schemes), but 3rd parties will be able to re-use agent minds as components in larger, multiple-mind, cognitive systems. Under this scheme, any 3rd party user on the Internet may select multiple minds from different remote "mind servers", select a remote "Action Selection server" to resolve the conflicts between them, and run the resulting "society of mind" in the world provided on another "world server". Re-use is done not by installing the software, but rather by using a remote service. Hence the term, the "World-Wide-Mind" (WWM), referring to the fact that the mind may be physically distributed across the world. This model addresses the possibility that the AI project may be too big for any single laboratory to complete, so it will be necessary both to decentralise the work and to allow a massive and ongoing experiment with different schemes of decentralisation. We expect that researchers will not agree on how to divide up the AI work, so components will overlap and be duplicated and we need multiple-conflicting minds models [21]. We define the set of queries and responses that the servers should implement. Initially we consider schemes of low-bandwidth communication, e.g. schemes using numeric weights to resolve competition. This protocol may initially be more suitable to sub-symbolic AI. The first prototype implementation is described in [47]. It may be premature in some areas of AI to formulate a "mind network protocol", but in the sub-symbolic domain it could be attempted now.