Mike Beedle’s position paper for the
upcoming Feyerabend workshop at the Santa Fe Institute in
April of 2002.
"Investigations" as Foundation for a Biological-Framing of Software
1. Introduction
This
document encloses a summary of "Investigations: The nature of Autonomous
Agents and the worlds they mutually create" [1]. and makes parallel
proposals for the study of software agents and people developing software
(human agents).
It is
proposed here that "Investigations" can serve as an excellent
foundation for a "biological framing" or even as an "agent-based
framing" of software and software teams, because of its wide applicability
and universality.
The above
cited on-going research includes a general setting of autonomous agents
processes and patterns that include the study of:
- life anywhere and its evolution
- all processes at the "biosphere" level: ecosystems, human
organizations, economies, etc.
- space-time, as a system of autocatalytic Planck-level agents
coevolving with each other, and even
- consciousness.
However, the
"laws" explored in this research, are universal, and can therefore be
used as a foundation to study autocatalytic processes of software agents, and
people developing software (human agents), such as the systems suggested in:
http://www.agilescrum.com
http://www.livingmetaphor.com
2. Summary and Proposals
The
introduction of "Investigations" discusses the
possibility
of "general laws":
"The most general aim of "Investigations" is to
explore whether there might, conceivably, be some general laws governing a
certain class of non-equilibrium systems - namely the class of coevolutionary
self-constructing communities of autonomous agents."
LECTURE 1
discusses parts I and II from "Origins":
"The first lecture discusses the general character of
"fitness landscapes," of coevolutionary processes in which the
adaptive moves of one "agent" deforms the fitness landscapes of its
partners, and tries to show that an endogenous coevolutionary process allows
"agents," each adapting for its own selfish "fitness," to
tune the couplings and ruggedness of their fitness landscapes such that the
entire system achieves a specific self-organized critical state. "
Proposal 1:
Study possible epistemic relationships of software agents systems human agents
developing software, in order to describe the fitness landscapes that these
systems obey given their constraints, for different classes of software and
people agents. (Here it is assumed that
the system has already emerged and that it is homeostatic.)
Proposal 2:
Study the deformations of fitness landscapes in the agent ecosystems defined by
software agents, software teams, and organizations hosting these teams, as the
agents in these systems coevolve.
LECTURE 2
discusses part III from "Origins":
"The heart of this view of the emergence of life lies in the
fact that as the diversity of organic molecules in a system increases, the
diversity of reactions by which they transform to one another increases very
much faster. In turn, this means that for a wide distribution of assumptions
about which molecules catalyze which reactions, at a sufficient diversity so
many reactions are catalyzed that a collectively autocatalytic set of molecules
is virtually certain to emerge."
Proposal 3:
Study the diversity of software agents and human agents developing software and
their "reactions", in order to study the emergence of autocatalytic
processes in these systems for different classes of software and people agents. (Here it is assumed that the multi-agents
are just emerging.)
and more,
"The Adjacent Possible. If we consider the species of organic
molecules now on the earth, we can also consider those species of organic
molecules that do not exist, but that are one reaction step away from molecules
that currently do exist. "
Proposal 4: Study the Adjacent Possible in both software agents
and human agents developing software, in terms of the existing agent
population, their selection rules and their self-organizing properties, for
different classes of software and people agents.
LECTURE 3
discusses autonomous agents:
"(Definition)
autonomous agent is a collectively autocatalytic system that performs one or
more thermodynamic work cycles."
(See
Proposal 1.)
LECTURE 4
discusses agents as Maxwell demons:
"An autonomous agent, a non-equilibrium Maxwell Demon,
coevolving in its community has embodied know-how. It knows how to make a
living in the context in which it lives and carries out real construction work
in doing so. Its self consistent structure and dynamical logic constitute the
embodied "record" of its environment, its reproduction and
proliferation carries out linked work cycles and simultaneously, via mutation
and selection, updates its record. "
"This leads me to consider that "organization" is
fundamentally related to that coordination of matter and energy which enables
and controls the constrained release of energy - work - to be propagated."
Proposal 5:
Study the knowledge acquisition of properties of software agents and human
agents developing software, for different classes of software and people
agents.
LECTURE 5
discusses the three apparently different phase transitions that communities of
autonomous agents must obey:
"1) As parallel processing systems, such Agents will lie
within the ordered regime or at a phase transition between dynamical order and
chaos. "
"As the members of the community tune their positions on
their internal order-chaos axis and their couplings to one another, these
evolutionary adaptations simultaneously tune the ruggedness of fitness
landscapes the web structure of the ecosystem, and the amount any Agent's
landscape is deformed by the mutational alterations of other agents. "
"As parallel processing systems, Autonomous Agents will tune
their internal molecular diversity and the species diversity of communities of
Agents, such that each Agent is subcritical, perhaps near the subcritical -
supracritical boundary, and such that the causally local community is just at
the subcritical - supracritical boundary. "
Proposal 6:
Study the phase transitions that both software agents and human agents
developing software must obey given their own characteristics and limitations
for a different classes of agents.
LECTURE 6
discusses hierarchies of agents:
"Hierarchical Agents are parts of the furniture of the
Universe. As they arise, the way the universe behaves changes."
"Thus, if we pass from a classical to a quantum description
of Agents, a task not yet even begun, then the symmetry breaking within each
"box" that sets all the internal thresholds leading the system to
flow in different directions, in enhancing the dimensionality of the adjacent
possible, must hit the Uncertainty Principle limit.
Proposal 7:
Study the hierarchies of software agents and human agents developing software
that naturally emerge given the given their own characteristics and limitations
for a different classes of agents.
Proposal 8:
Study the symmetry breaking relationships in the evolution of software agents
and human agents developing software given their own characteristics and
limitations for different classes of agents.
LECTURE 7
discusses makes some general statements about the biosphere to the universe,
and then works this statements into five themes:
"They derive from the realization that nothing in the
definition of an Autonomous Agent demands that it be made of organic molecules.
The functional closure within an autonomous Agent such that it can be collectively
autocatalytic and carry out work cycles yields the new concept that such a
functionally "whole" agent is the locus of a union of matter, energy
and information - propagating embodied know-how and work task cycles, that can
do honest construction work."
"The most radical possibility that I broach, based on the
work of Lee Smolin with respect to quantizing gravity in terms of spinnor
networks is that such networks can form combinatorially complex
"knotted" structures. Then, as molecules are combinatorially complex
objects and at sufficient diversity undergo a phase transition to collectively
autocatalytic systems, the same may be true of a knotted ravel of a
spinnor-net. Thus, space (or space and
mass-energy) might conceivably be comprised of autocatalytic autonomous Plank
scale agents coevolving with one another. One interpretation of such agents is
that they are the "crystallization" of seeds of classicity and its
propagation."
Theme 1
"First, I attempt to suggest that we explore a thermodynamics
in which the observer is an endogenous part of the system."
"The hope is to represent entropy as the information one
agent can have about each of its neighbors or its environment."
Proposal 9:
Study the thermodynamic properties of software agents and human agents
developing software from different points of view: internally, externally, for
different classes of software and people agents.
Theme 2
"Second, I explore the question of whether a large
quasi-closed thermodynamic system such as an isolated spiral galaxy with its
giant molecular clouds and their complex chemistry forming carbon rich dust
grains with a power-law distribution of sizes can be chemically supracritical
and hence not reach equilibrium for much longer time scales than the lifetime
of the universe. "
"Further, since agents need not be made of galaxy itself
might be comprised of a coevolving community of autonomous agents."
Proposal 10:
Study the equilibrium conditions of software agents and human agents developing
software.
Theme 3
"Smolin points out that General Relativity seems to require
that each point in space be different from every other point such that the
"night sky" looks different at each point. And Smolin points out that
the constants demanded by the Standard Model must be very finely tuned to
obtain a Universe as complex as ours, with stars, carbon, chemistry, and life.
Either an ultimate theory will derive the constants of the standard model,
string theory, or some other theory - or we will be left with adjustable
parameters. Smolin argues that some process of self-organization may be at work
in the Universe as a whole that tunes the parameters. It may not be entirely foolish to wonder if the self-organization
of a biosphere of self-constructing, coevolving autonomous agents in an
expanding effective phase space may not be a version of the Universal puzzle.
"Thus, if variety is distance in space, space will expand,
but ever more slowly. One might hope that this feature would relate naturally
to the apparently critical character of the ever slower expansion of the
Universe. "
Theme 4
"The fourth theme concerns this emergence of classicity in
quantum mechanics. It is generally accepted that interaction of a classical and
a quantum system causes the quantum system to decohere and become classic. This suggests that classicity is
"autocatalytic."
Theme 5
"Thus, in the fifth theme, I raise the question of whether
the Universe as a whole might self tune the constants of the Standard Model, or
any other fundamental theory with free parameters, such that the set of values
associated with the fastest amplifying complexity universe "wins."
"A fourth law, writ large, would have at its core a law
governing the non-ergodic flow of a self constructing universe expanding its
effective dimensionality as rapidly as is sustainably possible. Indeed, such
maximal expansion and symmetry breaking would emerge as the central law
governing the coevolution of the random laws of the spinnor network-law system.
Here time itself would be nothing but this expansion.
The
Epilogue, discusses a theory of consciousness based on molecular autonomous
agents:
" .. I make a tentative suggestion concerning the physical
basis of consciousness in molecular autonomous agents." The fundamental
ideas derive from the suggestion that, in order to expand their capacity to
make discriminations and refined actions, autonomous agents will partition a
bounded volume in a 6N classical phase space representing the state of an agent
or collection of agents, into ever finer volumes which ultimately encounter the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Limit. Further partitioning would presumably involve
quantum effects. This suggests that molecular autonomous agents would be expected
to span the classical and quantum realms. Indeed, cells do. A single photon can
cause rhodopsin in the retina to respond. A possible image of consciousness is
linked to the simultaneous propagation of quantum coherence in percolating webs
within living systems, for example, neural tissue, that is simultaneously
decohering along side channels as phase information is lost. This persistent
propagation of quantum coherent behavior and its decoherence into specific
fixed states of matter is then interpreted as "mind acting on
matter". The percolation of quantum coherences and persistent decoherence
is interpreted as consciousness itself in the experience of the agent. There
are some similarities between this hypothesis and Penrose's work, but suggested
on a different basis. Any such theory has the difficulty that quantum coherence
seems unlikely at body temperature. Conversely, propagating work in cells may
imply percolating webs of "frozen" degrees of freedom constituting
the constraints on the release of energy that itself constitutes work. Thus,
such frozen webs might have effectively lower local temperatures hence support
percolating propagating quantum behavior that also persistently decoheres.
"
Proposal 11:
Study the conditions by which software
agents and communities of human agents developing software become self-aware
i.e. consciousness in software, and collective consciousness in software teams.
The
proposals included in these document attempt to provide an incomplete list of
equivalent "Hilbert problems" in computing given that an agent
paradigm has been applied to both software and software teams.
[1] "Investigations: The nature of
Autonomous Agents and the worlds they mutually create" http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/Investigations.html
by Stewart Kauffman