https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/ Recent content on manyagents.porkbrain.com Hugo en-us Tue, 27 Aug 2024 13:50:59 +0100 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/012_mr_samizdat_and_the_moth/ Tue, 27 Aug 2024 13:50:59 +0100 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/012_mr_samizdat_and_the_moth/ This story is based on real future events. Names and places have been changed to protect the unborn. Mr Samizdat was just negotiating with a client when he received a call. He hardly ever let himself be interrupted during such occasions but if his sister called? It must’ve been bad. He apologized in business speak, sought privacy and picked up: … dear reader, you may not inspect the call at this moment either … https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/011_palindromic_poem/ Fri, 18 Aug 2023 11:12:00 +0100 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/011_palindromic_poem/ Palindromic poem doubles the length of your poem by definition. It can be read backwards and forwards. Punctuation can be rearranged freely. Leveraging homophones makes for more interesting in-person delivery. And that’s that We just stay together. Our decomposing cadavers: the final frontier of contemporary aesthetics contemporary of frontier Final the cadavers decomposing our together Stay just. We that, that’s and https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/010_rabbit_hole/ Wed, 11 Jan 2023 22:25:27 +0100 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/010_rabbit_hole/ (Paragraphs without sources are the author’s unsupported opinions.) There are no known receptors for alcohol in the brain. Therefore, alcohol must react in some way with receptors for neurotransmitters. It appears that dopamine, serotonin, endogenous opioids and GABA are the —neurotransmitters most associated with activation of alcohol reward centres in the CNS of rats. 1 Acute alcohol consumption enhances the release of serotonin, GABA and taurine. It decreases neuronal excitability in rats. https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/009_evolving_ai/ Thu, 08 Dec 2022 12:50:15 +0000 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/009_evolving_ai/ meta: I expanded my notes (bold) into a more consumable format with an editorialized output of a language model. let’s talk about natural selection via the lens of evolutionary algorithms. In an evolutionary algorithm, a set of candidate solutions (called “individuals” or “genomes”) is generated and then evaluated according to a set of criteria (called the “fitness function”). The individuals with the highest fitness are then selected to “reproduce” and create new, slightly modified versions of themselves (called “offspring”). https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/008_neocortical_lamination/ Thu, 03 Mar 2022 16:04:31 +0000 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/008_neocortical_lamination/ In this series of articles I summarize my neuroscience literature review. I tend to omit species specific variation unless I believe that stressing the differences may be illuminating. I focus on the neocortical evolution and development; cell classification; laminar structure and its vertical connections; long-range pathways. The human neocortex is a thin, convoluted sheet of tissue with surface area of ~2600 cm² and thickness of 2-4mm. It contains ~15-20 billion neurons broadly divided into ~6 horizontal layers. https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/007_pathetic_mcflurry/ Sun, 30 Jan 2022 23:28:48 +0000 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/007_pathetic_mcflurry/ Him and her. They sit on a sofa in a tiny rented London flat. The city wakes up into yet another busy evening. They opt for Sebastião Salgado: The Salt of the Earth. McDonald’s arrives just when the film presents famine in Sahel. He hits spacebar, he runs down, he thanks, he runs up, she thanks, she hits spacebar, they continue. As Netflix streams «through 2,073,600 little peepholes» Salgado’s photos of the enforced famine, she notes with a disgust or vile disappointment: “This McFlurry is pathetic. https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/006_draft_of_communication_protocol_c11np/ Sat, 25 Sep 2021 22:49:06 +0100 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/006_draft_of_communication_protocol_c11np/ In this article I draft a protocol for the emergence of communication in a collective of Bayesian agents $A$. A fundamental assumption is that agents can associate random binary strings (messages) with rewards from events in the environment and by chance eventually converge on a jargon1 under which those messages convey information. The objective is to (i) increase the convergence probability and to (ii) provide tools to analyze the system. https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/005_reverse_engineering_brain/ Sat, 11 Sep 2021 13:20:36 +0000 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/005_reverse_engineering_brain/ This article is concerned with two approaches to reverse-engineering the mammalian brain: (i) a design derived from deductive steps based on observations; (ii) a (biased) random search of the space of possible designs, i.e. considering a vastly larger set of options. Assume a threshold Tᵣ which sets a limit on the complexity of all programs feasibly designed (as per definition (i)) by given civilization. To discover useful programs above Tᵣ, the civilization must employ a massive parallel search over designs ordered by some fit function. https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/004_mas_references/ Mon, 22 Mar 2021 22:05:31 +0000 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/004_mas_references/ In this article I present references to existing literature which is relevant to my endeavour. I sourced primarily from a 2005 survey1; a 2020 survey2; a list of OpenAI papers; and a list of Google DeepMind papers. Channel Let’s examine some mechanisms by which messages are relayed between agents. When defining a channel, authors tend to use the dichotomy of continuous (ℝ) versus discreet (ℕ) messages. A single message tends to be low dimensional. https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/003_dragons_egg/ Thu, 18 Feb 2021 22:48:31 +0000 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/003_dragons_egg/ I present you a script for an unfinished short animation about Robert L. Forward’s hard sci-fi novel Dragon’s Egg. Some 50 million years ago a supergiant star collapsed. Its death roar gave birth to an extraordinary object - a neutron star. An anomaly set this neutron star on a course towards the Solar system where human astrophysicists would name it “Dragon’s Egg.” Our brains are not capable of dealing with the extremities on this strange, 20km wide object. https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/002_communication/ Fri, 12 Feb 2021 11:07:31 +0000 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/002_communication/ Communication is an emergent behaviour in multi-agent systems. An agent under this behaviour transmits signals with the intention of informing peers about an internal or external state. An agent’s peers are other agents in the environment whose goals are aligned with goals of the agent. All agents pursuing common goal in an environment form a collective. Why should we care about communication? If an agent decodes useful information from a signal, the agent can act on the information to optimize its performance. https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/001_swarm/ Fri, 05 Feb 2021 12:07:31 +0000 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/posts/001_swarm/ In his novel A Deepness in the Sky Vernor Vinge describes a nano technology called “the localizers.” These point-sized objects float in zero-gee and communicate with other localizers in their proximity. A localizer is equipped with some processing power and sensors. Localizers in zero-gee are a handy abstraction for thinking about distributed systems. They can model systems across scales (a point can be a dust smite or a planet) and one can plug in any interesting sensors and constrains. https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/background/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://manyagents.porkbrain.com/background/ List of selected resources which shaped my understanding of the field. Online courses Nancy Kanwisher. 9.13 The Human Brain. Spring 2019. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. Books S. Murray Sherman and R. W. Guillery. Functional Connections of Cortical Areas: A New View from the Thalamus. August 2013. ISBN: 9780262019309. The MIT Press. Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin. Principles of Neural Design. June 2017. ISBN: 9780262534680. The MIT Press.