Title: New perspectives in computational intelligence: nothing so intelligent as randomness, nothing so effective as asymmetry

Authors: Bruno Apolloni, Simone Bassis

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Milan, via Comelico 39/41, 20135 Milano, Italy. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Milan, via Comelico 39/41, 20135 Milano, Italy

Abstract: Leaving the expert systems framework of the 80s and the early connectionist paradigm of the 90s, the scientific community is now drawn by social computing paradigms, where a huge number of agents individually do an elementary job and jointly give rise to a sophisticated functionality. There is no doubt that the complexity of this functionality is connected to the randomness of the agents| work. What comes increasingly clear is that this randomness is a guarantee of success, not a drawback, provided we avoid falling in the ordinary Gaussian phenomenology in the province of the central limit theorem. We envisage a jointly biased asymmetry of the agents| actions to be the main feature distinguishing them from the molecules of a gas in Brownian motion, and toss this idea in the paper through specific statistical models we elaborated in recent works.

Keywords: social computing; randomness; asymmetry; intentionality; compatibility; computational intelligence; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCISTUDIES.2009.025336

International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies, 2009 Vol.1 No.1, pp.6- 36

Published online: 19 May 2009 *

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