ACEnetica

This is a new blog for discussing ideas about self-organising networks (SON).

The term "ACEnetica" is derived from the phrase "Adaptive Cluster Expansion network", which is what I call my own offering in the field of self-organising networks.

What is a SON?

1. The "N" stands for "network" by which I actually mean a network of interconnected processing nodes, where the global processing activity is broken down into a number of smaller processing activities.
2. The "SO" stands for "self-organising" by which I mean that both the processing at each node and the interconnections between nodes can be adjusted dynamically.

This general definition of a SON covers a wide range of possibilities. However, the only SON approaches that I consider worth discussing in this blog are those that are "scientific"; the rest of the approaches fall into the category of "natural philosophy" which is definitely not the focus of this blog.

This means that the approach must have the following minimal properties:

1. It must be supported by a consistent theoretical framework.
2. It must have predictive power.
3. It must be open to falsification.

There are two levels at which prediction and falsification are done with processing networks:

1. Relationship with the external physical world. This is conventional "science", where the processing network is judged by its ability to explain experimental observations.
2. Relationship with the world of algorithms. This is unconventional "science", and could be called "a new kind of science" (see http://www.wolframscience.com/), where the processing network is judged by its ability to construct processing algorithms.

Some additional properties that are desirable (but not essential) in a SON approach are:

1. It should scale well with network "size".
2. It should include "standard" approaches as special cases.

An extra property that would be a real bonus if it emerged for free:

It explains some (or even all) of the properties of brain-like processing.

In this blog I will attempt to present SONs within the above context.

Tag: ACEnetica