A Manditory “Hello World”

This is my first post to the research blog, and as such I’ve been considering the general format of these entries. I’ll try for once-a-week updates, assuming there is anything to update about, and once I get some other webspace @ Sussex I’ll be posting current research results, links to papers and related work / blogs, as well as my thoughts as to my current research directions.

On that note, coming to Sussex my main stated research focus was in understanding scale transitions in evolutionary terms. “Living” systems, over the past 4 billion years they existed, have slowly developed into a heiarchy of scaled systems. Though Maynard Smith’s “Transitions” probably explains it more comprehensively than any other source, the main idea is that life has slowly organized from “simple” autocatalytic chemical systems to self-maintaining distributed ecosystems of organisms made themselves of distributed cells. How is it possible for evolution to drive toward distributed organization, so that, for instance, the units of selection change from cells to organisms? The answer may be (and probably is) highly complex, having to do with particular organisms and environments throughout history, but there must be some set of minimal requirements for evolution to act on distributed systems instead of single replicators.

In order to address this (highly theoretical) topic, I’ve currently decided to take a rather meandering approach. Instead of tackling evolution of distributed systems head-on, with no preconcieved notions of what these systems might be, I plan to assume that all of the distributed systems evolution sees in the natural world are self-organized. After all, for evolution to work on any system, that system must self-replicate, and the first of these replicating systems must logically have emerged in a self-organized way. Through self-assembly then, and self-replication, we can put borders on the potentially unbounded set of organization types evolution uses when scale transitions occur.

As a bonus to this approach, self-assembling / self-organizing systems (these terms basically view the same process from different perspectives) of multiple scales are rare in engineering, and of huge potential use.  A system which has predictable (and controllable) behavior from the very large to very small would essentially “decouple” the assembly problem from the scale at which the assembly occurs.  I.e., building a robot the size of a man becomes as computationally “easy” as building a robot the size of a city. I assume that there are fundamental limitations as to how far this decoupling could be applied in the real world, and hope to discover what these are.

I now (after debugging feverishly last night) have a simulation of swarm robots exhibiting this kind of scalable building behavior, which assumes only that each robot is able to move at a constant speed, know the distance to every other robot, and each timestep communicate three numbers with one another on a large number of virtual “channels.” Hopefully I’ll be able to post the video online soon. This particular simulation seems a good testbed to “verify” (to myself) assumptions and mathematical models of multi-scale assembly, as the behavior of the agents is really very simple (gravitationally inspired, actually), but the coordination entirely scale free.