Hello all! I bet you thought that I had given up on this enterprise - to tell you the truth, I got depressed about the whole matter :-( That can happen, I guess, to the best of 'um, but in the future I want to write more regularly to this blog. I got a scare put into me that the material in the blog and website were "grandiose". This fear shut me down for a few weeks. This experience brings to mind a mantra from the science fiction novel, Dune, by Frank Herbert, one of my favorite books from childhood called the The Bene Gesserit Litany of Fear: I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see it's path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I experienced a breakthrough in my research this weekend. The Information Society Technology program, sponsored by the European Union, has recently released some open source software projects developed by consortiums of European universities that I find most interesting. One of these projects is called "Agent Academy" and other is called "The DREAM project". I will elaborate in detail about these projects in the future. I believe the above projects are significant, however, because they bring the power of complexity theory “to the masses”. Anyone with a personal computer, an internet connection, some technical ability, and imagination can download the software and begin to run their own experiments to investigate to real world phenomena.

I would like to see the two IST systems coupled together to exploit both of their features. The “solution space” of possible multiagent / artificial life systems should be ‘searched out” using “grids of computers” to generate extremely large data sets to be analyzed with data mining and visualization techniques. This, I believe, is necessary basic research that needs to be done in order to go forward with the Wisdom Seeker IDE. This approach is being used by the University of California at Berkeley’s SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project ), which employs’ “screen savers” running on the PC’s of users across the world to do processing of radio telescope signals. The power of this approach is described on the SETI website as follows: The SETI@home project is an awesome display of the power of distributed grid computing. Starting with a base of 1500 volunteers in 1998, SETI@home has grown to more than 4.7 million participants in 226 countries, with 2000 new volunteers signing up daily. The SETI@home volunteers have formed the planet’s largest supercomputer, averaging 60 teraflops [60 trillion floating point operations per second] and donating about 1200 years of CPU time daily.

What sort of data would the integrated system analyze? As hard as it is to believe, agents and multiagent systems have many of the characteristics of humans and human societies, such as beliefs, goals, plans, emotions (affective computing), traits, trust, delegation, cooperation, communication, and ethics. A strange, but familiar new world! Some phenomena may be analogous to our world, and some may be novel (or even alien – and worth studying in its own right). My point is this – if countries can spend billions of dollars searching for intelligence in outer space, then it has the funds to search for intelligence right here at home…

The main thing is that life is moving for me again - which brings to mind an Eastern saying:

If you want to know your past life,

look into your present condition;

if you want to know your future,

look into your present action.



It is not the wind that is moving;

it is not the flag that is moving;

it is mind that is moving.



There are no holy places and no holy people,

only holy moments, only moments of wisdom.