They came from afar like clouds. Despite the abundance of microbots in “Prey” best-selling author Michael Crichton organizes himself. He used his uncanny intelligence, learning, flexibility, and self-talk to gain power. A new example from a team of Penn State researchers and inspired by Crichton’s paper describes how (This model shows how intelligent behavior can emerge from non-living things) biological or biological processes form complex organisms with signaling capabilities that allow for the system to respond to stimuli and perform functional tasks without external guidance.
“Basically, the little nanobots become self-organizing and self-aware,” said Igor Aronson, Huck Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Mathematics at Penn State, explaining the plan of the book Crichton. The paper inspired Aronson to study the emergence of collective movements between social actors and independent actors. The research was recently published in Nature Communications.
Aronson and a team of scientists from the LMU University of Munich have developed a new model to explain how biological or synthetic systems form complex structures with minimal signal processing capabilities that allow the system to respond motivation and performance work without external guidance. . The findings have implications for microrobotics and for any field concerned with self-assembled mechanical devices made from simple building blocks, Aronson said. For example, robotics engineers can create microrobots that can perform complex tasks such as disposing of pollutants or detecting hazards.
“If we look at nature, we see that many living things depend on communication and cooperation because it improves their chances of survival,” Aronson said. said.
A computer model developed by researchers at Penn State and Ludwig-Maximillian University predicts that communication by small groups of people using their hands leads to intelligent collective behavior. The study showed that communication increases the ability of individuals to create complex functional states such as life processes.
The team built their model to mimic the behavior of social amoebae, single-celled organisms that can create complex structures through communication through chemical signals. They studied one thing in particular. When food is scarce, the amoebae release a chemical messenger called cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP), which causes the amoebae to gather together and form multicellular aggregates.
“This is well known,” co-author Erwin Frey of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München said in a statement. “Until now, however, no single study has studied how organizational information, at a general level, affects the aggregation of system agents when individual agents – in our case, amoebas – are independent – propelled.”
For decades, scientists have pursued a better understanding of “active substances”, biological or synthetic processes that transform stored energy in the environment, such as nutrients, in the organizational process and form a larger structure through self-organization. Taken individually, the object has no intelligence or function, but collectively the object can respond to its environment with a form of rapid intelligence, Aronson explained. It’s an old idea with futuristic applications.
Aristotle developed the concept of emergence about 2,370 years ago in his treatise “Metaphysics”. His language is often described as “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”. In the near future, Aronson says emerging systems research could lead to cell-sized nanobots that self-organize inside the body to fight viruses or autonomous swarms of microbots.
“We often talk about artificial intelligence as some kind of Android with advanced thinking,” Aronson said. “What I’m working on is distributed artificial intelligence. Every intelligent thing is not intelligent, but when they are connected, they can make joint responses and make decisions.
Currently there is a huge demand for distributed intelligence in the field of robotics, Aronson explained.
“If you’re designing a robot in the most cost-effective way, you don’t want to make it too complicated,” he said. “We want to make small, simple robots, just a few transistors, that when they work together have the same function as a complex machine, but without expensive and complicated machines. This research will open new avenues for the application of active materials in nanosciences and robotics.
Aronson explained that from a practical point of view, distributed intelligence can be used in any form of matter with microscopically dispersed particles in suspension. It can be injected into the body to release anti-inflammatory drugs or to activate small electronic circuits in small microrobots.
“Despite its importance, the role of communication in terms of performance remains largely unexplained,” the researchers wrote. “We identify the decision-making machine of individual workers as the driving mechanism for the self-organization of the system.”
