7
Society as a Neural Net
A social group is also a network. If a hunter corners a mother
otter, she'll cry out for her mate. If the hunter kills her, her babies will
starve. She's only one nexus in a web of relationships.
Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory at MIT, thinks of the brain as a society--a society of
sub-assemblies cooperating to learn about the world.6 The image can
easily be reversed. A society is a brain. It is a learning device. And it
works according to the principles that drive a neural net.
Like switches wired together in a connectionist web, a
community of bees is constantly communicating to form a mass brain
that can solve problems no single bee could ever tackle. In one
experiment, scientists began by placing a dish of sugar water at the exit
of a hive. Over the course of time, they moved the water, first a few
inches from the hive, then a few feet, then a few feet more--always
increasing the distance by a precise increment. The researchers
expected that the bees would follow the dish and cluster around it. To
their surprise, after a few days, the insects were doing far more than
merely tagging along after the moving sugar water. The bees would
fly from the hive and cluster on a spot where the dish had NOT been
placed--the site where the insects anticipated the dish would be put
next. And their calculations were right on target.7
Working as a mass brain,8 the bees had accomplished something
humans are forced to endure in college entrance exams. They had
solved the problem of a mathematical series.
The brain of a bee is an insubstantial thing--a slender thread of
neural fiber scarcely capable of anything we would call intelligence.
But the strength of a neural net does not lie in the limited abilities of
any one node in the web. The strength of the connectionist
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