What keeps a mouse contained in a box? It is the way a box prevents motion in all directions. Each board bars escape in a certain direction. The left side keeps the mouse from going left, the right from going right, the top keeps it from leaping out, and so on. The secret of a box is simply in how the boards are arranged to prevent motion in all directions. That’s what containing means.
What makes a tower more than separate blocks, or a wall more than a set of many bricks? Every block/brick is held in place by its neighbors and gravity. Why is a chain more than its various links? To explain why chain-links cannot come apart, we can demonstrate how each would get in its neighbors’ way. In graphical diagrams of such physical situations, the edges drawn between nodes are – implicitly or explicitly – labeled, qualified relations.
Some like to focus on the new. They like to invent theories. Some are adamant about reducing to what has come before. This has worked remarkably well for the core of physics. These inclinations are not incompatible given some kind of “leveling”, with discipline about connections. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. Much of apparent “novelty” may be reducible to the structured annotation and (re-)configuration of core mechanism.
An agent like Builder is not merely a collection of parts like Find , Get , Put , and all the rest. Builder would not work at all unless those agents were linked to one another by a suitable network of interconnections: Could you predict what Builder does from knowing just that left-hand list above? Of course not. First, we must know how each separate part works.
It is the nature of FAIR that can make digital resources kin – interoperable in fugues of machine action. The differences in the schema, serialization, or domain-specificity of the digital datoms out of whose intricate relationships any given resource is built are altogether trivial. Subscribe to get short notes like this on Machine-Centric Science delivered to your email.
We want to explain complicated things as a combination of simpler things. You must be prepared to feel a certain sense of loss. When we break things down to their smallest parts, they may each seem as dry as dust at first, as though some essence has been lost. Where does the “knowing-how-to-build” of a Builder agent reside? It is not in any part, so it is not enough to explain what each separate agent does.
We found a way to make a tower builder out of parts. But Builder is really far from done. For example, how could Find determine which blocks are still available for use? It would have to “understand” the scene in terms of what it is trying to do. We’ll need theories both about what it means to understand and about how a machine could have a goal.
Imagine a child playing with blocks. Imagine the child’s mind contains a host of smaller minds - “agents”. Imagine an agent called Builder in control. Builder makes towers from blocks: Builder is a simple agent.
For a method, a protocol, thought about and done by you, what’s a “you”? What kinds of smaller entities may cooperate to carry out a procedure? Try this: pick up a cup of tea . Imagine that your GRASPING agents want to keep hold of the cup, your BALANCING agents want to keep the tea from spilling out, your THIRST agents want you to drink the tea, and your MOVING agents want to get the cup to your lips.
How could solid-seeming computer hardware support such a ghostly thing as research progress? The world of scientific inquiry and the world of bits appear too far apart to interact in any way. A few centuries ago it seemed impossible to explain Life - living things appeared to be so different from anything else. Last century, von Neumann helped show how cell-machines could reproduce.
