Swarm computers are coming and what?

D. Dibenski [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

At this time we speak of swarms and we may think of swarm intelligence or we may think of the swarm in the biological sense such as a swarm of bees, but in the very near future we are likely going to see a new kind of swarm which I’ll call swarm computers. These swarms will be built up of human, AI, and cyborg (human/AI hybrid) participants. It is these kinds of swarms which will enable a new age both for computing and for collaborative decision making.
The mechanics of a swarm computer can be understood by studying bees.

To understand the mechanics of how a swarm computer will work we can take a look at bee hives and the process of flower pollination. Bees send scouts to search for the best flowers and typically the most experienced bees are the scouts. In essence this is a search optimization algorithm (also called a metaheuristic algorithm) in computer science where bees are attracted to a certain information pattern which represents a signal for fitness. The scouts determine that certain flowers are more fit than others and during this process there is a coordination mechanism called stigmergy which allows the scouts to communicate with the rest of the hive.

Stigmergy is the coordinating force of a swarm computer and it is enhanced by blockchains.

This stigmergy is similar to a process used by investors where investors develop indexes (fitness lists) for other investors which get shared and where investors naturally follow the habits of more experienced successful investors such as Warren Buffet. The latest blockchain technologies being developed allow for a very different kind of stigmergy in that through the blockchain every investor can automatically choose to follow any other investor and this means any investor can leave a virtual pheromone trail through the blockchain. Of course this is something which applies to more than just investing and it includes much more sophisticated activities.

The first use case of the swarm computer could be the decentralized search engine.

Currently a decentralized search engine is seen as an unsolved problem of academia much like how the byzantine generals problem was once seen. DARPA on the other hand is actively funding research into a technology they call domain specific search under the project name MEMEX. Tauchain is a project which is attempting to use a new decidable programming language specifically suited for the construction of a swarm computer and one of their first projects is intended to be a decentralized search engine. The recently launched The DAO is fueling the development of an Ethereum Computer which I suspect is going to evolve into a swarm computer. So it is possible that all of the technologies are either in place or are converging to enable the development of a swarm computer within the next 3-5 years.

Some thoughts on how a decentralized search engine might work.

Sean J.A. Edwards [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In order to have a functioning swarm computer you need the ability to compute. This computation itself is a commodity to the swarm computer and can come from all sources whether human computation or machine. The algorithmic core of the swarm would likely be code and this code would run on many computers in such a way that anyone can sell computation to the algorithmic core in the form of renting their spare CPU cycles, or in the form of doing a human computation for problems an AI cannot solve. This unique merger between human and AI computation is what ultimately will enable the swarm computer to do tasks such as search, as all necessary resources such as storage space, computation, code writing, all can be commoditized and tokenized.

Wtsai36 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Algorithmic crowd sourcing is what will bring everything together. The trend of microwork, and of ambient labor similar to what is seen from Amazon Turk will enable in the future anyone to compute decentralized and to rent all kinds of human labor or computation to aid in a trust minimized manner. This includes the ability to code which can also be broken up into a series of microjobs and spread across thousands or millions of complete strangers.

With great power comes great responsibility. Swarm computers are approaching and these new manifestations of computers will allow us to solve the most difficult problems on earth. On the other hand a swarm computer is only going to be beneficial if we ask it the right questions or choose the right problems in the first place.

References
Darpa MEMEX Project
http://www.darpa.mil/program/memex

The Ethereum Computer
https://slock.it/ethereum_computer.html

Tauchain/IDNI
http://www.idni.org/blog/code-and-money

Solving wicked problems is a four-way partnership
http://humancomputation.org/?p=105