published in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence (ANTS 2008), Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNSC 5217, Springer-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-540-87526-1, pp. 339-346, 2008.

Abstract. This paper investigates a new model that takes advantage of the cooperative self-organization of Ant Algorithms to evolve a naturally inspired pattern recognition (and also clustering) method. The approach considers each data item as an ant that changes the environment as it moves through it. The algorithm is successfully applied to well-known classification problems and yields better results than some other classification approaches, like K-Nearest Neighbours and Neural Networks.

Via communication through the environment (stigmergy), the ants/samples tend to form clusters, according to their class. Here, an example with the Iris data.

Carlos Miguel Fernandes

• The code projectand this
• Saurabh Samdani
• Danilo Benzatti
• Eric Rollins
• TU Clausthal
• Marc Sinclair
• Ugo Chirico
• Intraspirit
• codeplex
• Nodebox
• Mikkel Bundgaard

Sorry, I did not try them myself !

This comes as a surprise, but a very pleasant one. I am very glad to have found his page, it promises to be a very different Web-Log and could indeed grow into one of the top blogs on Swarming, Self-Organization, Complexity and Distributed Systems as it would be by a leading expert in the field. It would be great to catch up on his work. In the past I have tried to write on some of his interesting work on my own page. My posts can be found here.

[Vitorino Ramos: Image Source]

Dr Ramos' research areas are chiefly in Artificial Life, Artificial Intelligence, Bio-Inspired Computing, Collective Intelligence and Complex Systems. He obtained his PhD in 2004 and has published about 70 papers in the above fields and their broad application areas. So put simply it can be said that the IQ of the "blogosphere" has gone up a little with this addition.

For starters I would recommend his article on Financial Markets (given the situation today), talking about the herd mentality and the resulting amplification in dumb investors and its results and what it could result in. Most investors do not understand much of the market mechanism. This is a bare fact put most aptly in this cartoon I found on his blog, and his post goes much beyond that.

[Image Source]

Click to Enlarge

And going by the website and blog name, it seems that Dr Ramos is now interested in some sense in Tibor Ganti's Chemoton Theory.

---

Quick Links:

1. Vitorino Ramos' Homepage.

2. Dr Ramos' Publications. (PDFs available online)

---

Onionesque Reality Home >>

[] Vitorino Ramos, Fernandes, C., Rosa, A.C., Abraham, A., Computational Chemotaxis in Ants and Bacteria over Dynamic Environments, in CEC´07 - Congress on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Press, USA, ISBN 1-4244-1340-0, pp. 1009-1017, Sep. 2007.

Chemotaxis can be defined as an innate behavioural response by an organism to a directional stimulus, in which bacteria, and other single-cell or multicellular organisms direct their movements according to certain chemicals in their environment. This is important for bacteria to find food (e.g., glucose) by swimming towards the highest concentration of food molecules, or to flee from poisons. Based on self-organized computational approaches and similar stigmergic concepts we derive a novel swarm intelligent algorithm. What strikes from these observations is that both eusocial insects as ant colonies and bacteria have similar natural mechanisms based on stigmergy in order to emerge coherent and sophisticated patterns of global collective behaviour. Keeping in mind the above characteristics we will present a simple model to tackle the collective adaptation of a social swarm based on real ant colony behaviors (SSA algorithm) for tracking extrema in dynamic environments and highly multimodal complex functions described in the well-know De Jong test suite. Later, for the purpose of comparison, a recent model of artificial bacterial foraging (BFOA algorithm) based on similar stigmergic features is described and analyzed. Final results indicate that the SSA collective intelligence is able to cope and quickly adapt to unforeseen situations even when over the same cooperative foraging period, the community is requested to deal with two different and contradictory purposes, while outperforming BFOA in adaptive speed. Results indicate that the present approach deals well in severe Dynamic Optimization problems.

(to obtain the respective PDF file follow link above or visit chemoton.org)

Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This approach emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the biological studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behavior occurs (check for more).

Possible laboratories around the world that follow this line of research include (Europe) Marco Dorigo's Swarm-Bots Project in Brussels plus Swarm-Intelligent Systems Group, EPFL, in Lausanne, and CORO over Caltech, USA, among many others.

[] Vitorino Ramos, Jonathan Campbell, John Slater, John Gillespie, Ivan F. Bendezu and Fionn Murtagh, Swarming around Shellfish Larvae Images, in WCLC-05, 2nd World Congress on Lateral Computing, Bangalore, India, 16-18 Dec., 2005.

The collection of wild larvae seed as a source of raw material is a major sub industry of shellfish aquaculture. To predict when, where and in what quantities wild seed will be available, it is necessary to track the appearance and growth of planktonic larvae. One of the most difficult groups to identify, particularly at the species level are the Bivalvia. This difficulty arises from the fact that fundamentally all bivalve larvae have a similar shape and colour. Identification based on gross morphological appearance is limited by the time-consuming nature of the microscopic examination and by the limited availability of expertise in this field. Molecular and immunological methods are also being studied. We describe the application of computational pattern recognition methods to the automated identification and size analysis of scallop larvae. For identification, the shape features used are binary invariant moments; that is, the features are invariant to shift (position within the image), scale (induced either by growth or differential image magnification) and rotation. Images of a sample of scallop and non-scallop larvae covering a range of maturities have been analysed. In order to overcome the automatic identification, as well as to allow the system to receive new unknown samples at any moment, a self-organized and unsupervised ant-like clustering algorithm based on Swarm Intelligence is proposed, followed by simple k-NNR nearest neighbour classification on the final map. Results achieve a full recognition rate of 100% under several situations (k =1 or 3).

(to obtain the respective PDF file follow link above or visit chemoton.org)

[] Vitorino Ramos, Ajith Abraham, ANTIDS: Self-Organized Ant-based Clustering Model for Intrusion Detection System,  in Swarm Intelligence and Patterns special session at WSTST-05 - 4th IEEE Int. Conf. on Soft Computing as Transdisciplinary Science and Technology - Japan, LNCS series, Springer-Verlag, Germany, pp. 977-986, May 2005.

Security of computers and the networks that connect them is increasingly becoming of great significance. Computer security is defined as the protection of computing systems against threats to confidentiality, integrity, and availability. There are two types of intruders: the external intruders who are unauthorized users of the machines they attack, and internal intruders, who have permission to access the system with some restrictions. Due to the fact that it is more and more improbable to a system administrator to recognize and manually intervene to stop an attack, there is an increasing recognition that ID systems should have a lot to earn on following its basic principles on the behavior of complex natural systems, namely in what refers to self-organization, allowing for a real distributed and collective perception of this phenomena. With that aim in mind, the present work presents a self-organized ant colony based intrusion detection system (ANTIDS) to detect intrusions in a network infrastructure. The performance is compared among conventional soft computing paradigms like Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines and Linear Genetic Programming to model fast, online and efficient intrusion detection systems.

(to obtain the respective PDF file follow link above or visit chemoton.org)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

There are many ways in which the Web, or the Internet, is used in communicating information. The Internet is a platform with multiple applications. We are not concerned here with all applications of the Internet, only with one of the more recent and influential ones, viz., blogging and its associated realm, the blogosphere. Richard Posner (2005) argues that blogging is gradually displacing conventional journalism as a source of news and the dissection of news. Moreover, Posner argues – though with some qualifications and murkiness in his message -- that this is not inimical to the public’s epistemic good. The argument seems to be that blogging, as a medium of political communication and deliberation, is no worse from the standpoint of public knowledge than conventional journalism. Posner highlights this point in the matter of error detection.

[T]he blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media, only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek’s classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants. In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise – not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet almost no costs. It’s as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising. (Posner 2005, pp. 10-11)

This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public …

In these passages Posner seems to be saying that the blogosphere is more accurate, and hence a better instrument of knowledge, than the conventional media. But elsewhere he introduces an important qualification, viz., that the bloggers are parasitical on the conventional media.

They [the bloggers] copy the news and opinion generated by the conventional media, without picking up any of the tab. The degree of parasitism is striking in the case of those blogs that provide their readers with links to newspaper articles. The links enable the audience to read the articles without buying the newspaper. The legitimate gripes of the conventional media is not that bloggers undermine the overall accuracy of news reporting, but that they are free riders who may in the long run undermine the ability of the conventional media to finance the very reporting on which bloggers depend. (Posner 2005, p. 11)

As I would express it, the point to be learned is that we cannot compare the blogosphere and the conventional news outlets as two wholly independent and alternative communication media, because the blogosphere (in its current incarnation, at least) isn’t independent of the conventional media; it piggy-backs, or free-rides, on them. Whatever credit is due to the blogs for error correction shouldn’t go to them alone, because their error-checking ability is derivative from the conventional media.

It would also be a mistake to confuse the aforementioned theme of Posner’s article with the whole of his message, or perhaps even its principal point. Posner’s principal point is to explain the decline of the conventional media in economic terms. Increase in competition in the news market, he says, has brought about more polarization, more sensationalism, more healthy skepticism, and, in sum, “a better matching of supply to demand” (2005, p. 11). Most people do not demand, i.e., do not seek, better quality news coverage; they seek entertainment, confirmation (of their prior views), reinforcement, and emotional satisfaction. Providers of news have been forced to give consumers what they want. This is a familiar theme from economics-minded theorists.

What this implies, however, is that Posner’s analysis is only tangentially addressed to our distinctively epistemic question: Is the public better off or worse off, in terms of knowledge or true belief (on political subjects), with the current news market? Granted that the public at large isn’t interested – at least not exclusively interested – in accurate political knowledge, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take an interest in this subject. It is perfectly appropriate for theorists of democracy and public ethics to take an interest in this question, especially in light of the connection presented in section 1 between successful democracy and the citizenry’s political knowledge. So let us set aside Posner’s larger message and focus on the two mass communication mechanisms he identifies to see how they fare in social epistemological terms, i.e., in terms of their respective contributions to true vs. false beliefs.

Book cover via Amazon

But what does this all mean ?

We know that swarm intelligence is the result of evolution. According to Kevin Kelly evolution is to slow, so some central control is needed to speed things up. I think he misses the point. It is not the speed that is all about, but the direction.
Evolution is the result of organisms adapting to changing environments. And with environments, I mean environments in its largest meaning : everything outside (and even inside) the organism. All the other individuals of the same species, all the individuals of other species (plants, animals, bacteria, viruses), all the the inanimate matter, air composition ... Indeed : everything.
And what is the role of that "everything" in evolution ? It shows direction. Directly or indirectly, it drives organisms to adapt. Example : If climate becomes cooler, animals of a same species become larger (better volume/surface ratio and hence less heat loss). If you provide a forest with nestboxes for decades, the box-inhabiting birds become smaller, since they do not have to fight any longer for holes (the biggest wins the fight) as there plenty of them. Etc.
Without these environmental factors, evolution knows no direction.

The same with swarm intelligence in web 2.0 . If you have something like wikipedia, there are from the start already some dedicated people who want wikipedia to be a high quality encyclopedia. As they are the most dedicated, they will do the necessary effort to give direction to the swarm. They will give negative feedback on lousy topics. They are the evolutional force that guides the rest of the swarm towards quality.

The same happens in a knowledge enterprise. People can act as a swarm, doing whatever the thing they need to do. But unless they all know exactly what "the company" wants, they need some central control to point all noses in the same direction.

So the lesson for management is really simple : do not tell your people how to do their job, but tell them often and very clearly what it is the company wants to do. Reward every act, project, initiative that helps the company forward in the desired direction and correct every behaviour that forms an obstacle to the goals of the company. And when there are several levels of management, make sure every one of them tells the same thing and even more important : is an example of the "good" behaviour.
The swarm will do the rest.

Related articles by Zemanta

• We Are The One

(excellent talk by Kevin Kelly)

Finally! I’ve been meaning to write another blog post but the first few days of COLLEGE have been busy, busy, busy. It’s just past 6:30 p.m. and the sun is setting behind the islands near Tacoma and Olympia as I sit on an Amtrak train down to Portland. I’m here with Raja, his friend K7, and Aiden, who I played little league baseball with back in the day and all four of us Huskies live in Portland. We’re all going down to Portland for Labor Day Weekend.

I arrived at UW on Sunday and it’s been just about 5 days on campus now and so far it has been awesome, to say the least. College life is fun—you’re given more freedom and it’s fun to live on your own. But with the new freedom comes more responsibility. We make our own decisions now; when we eat, what we eat, when to study, where to study, where to go, it goes on and on. But it’s awesome.

I’ve had to write 1000 word summary and responses everyday so far for my early fall start class “Science of the Swarms.” We’ve been learning about ants and how the colonies display more intelligence than most of us think. This “swarm intelligence” is a great example of organization and efficiency and can help humans in aspects such as telecommunications, business, engineering, defense, and networking. My group is going to work on a powerpoint presentation regarding the connections of swarm intelligence and business, since two of the three people (including me) in the group are intended business majors. It’s been a very interesting class so far and despite the large amounts of work, I’m happy because I think it will prepare me for all the workload come autumn quarter.

I have class 930am-1200 Monday-Thursday so it gives me a lot of time to explore. I’m on crutches (how’d that happen?..been asked that question sooo much haha. And I’m not proud of the reason.) but I’ve still managed to get around. Yesterday three friends and I drove into downtown Seattle and went to NikeTown, Adidas and a few other stores. Seattle reminded me of a huge Portland—that same northwest feeling. There were just more people, bigger buildings, and more noise. Downtown Seattle was really cool and I’m lucky that it’s only 15 minutes from campus so I can go downtown a lot.

The day before, a few friends and I went to the University Village (U-Village) to go around to the shops and look for some new clothes for my roommate Chris. Then we drove about 10 minutes up 15^th street to a few more stores and stopped at a mall called Northgate Mall. It’s a big, clean mall that has all the shops and stores. Again, it’s just a short way from campus so if I ever need anything I can drive or take the bus, or even walk(when I get off these crutches) up to the Mall. It’s really convienent.

Food. Freshman 15 anyone? We’ve mostly been eating in a restaurant/cafeteria on the 1^st floor of our dorm called 1101 (street number of the Terry Dorm…1201 is Lander Dorm). It is pretty good food but not the healthiest option. There is a deli as well, which offers more healthy options but is a bit more expensive. I’ve already eaten on The Ave four or five times. There’s any kind of food imaginable on The Ave: Delis, Thai, Pho, Mexican, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, European, you name it! It’s freaking amazing. So far I’ve eaten at Chipotle twice (burritos are so damn good), Taco Del Mar, and had some Pad Thai at a Thai restaurant (there’s probably 3 or 4 on The Ave). I’ve still got to find the best Pad Thai and best Pho..I’m sure students around UW know the best spots to eat.

Dorm. Yeah, I'm in a triple, and yeah, it's kinda small. But my roommates are really cool and we are having a great time. The elevators were confusing at first but now we figured it out. Lander is a pretty cool hall with some good places to study. The bathrooms are alright, they stay pretty clean. And that coffeemaker I bought has come in handy for that caffeine boost. Overall, the dorms are a pretty cool place to live.

Well, now I'm back home finishing up this post and watching our future president, Barack Obama, speak in great volumes at the Democratic National Convention. Barack On!

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="238" caption="The Familes"][/caption]

Another post should be up in the next few days. For now I'm going to enjoy good ol' Portland. I forgot how much I love the Rose City :)

]]> http://manwithoutqualities.wordpress.com/?p=587 Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:09:57 +0000 manwithoutqualities http://manwithoutqualities.es.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/top-of-the-cognitive-sciences-research-pops/ This is sad, I know - it reminds me of when the "Top of the Pops" actually meant something to us 70s kids! Anyway, I was pleased to learn that 11 of the 13 articles from the themed double issue of Cognitive Systems Research ("Perspectives on Social Cognition") have appeared in the top 25 most downloaded articles from Cognitive Systems Research over the first quarter.  Indeed, 4 papers occupy the top 4 slots.

I despise roaches to the highest extent. But this research is interesting because it persuades roaches to do what they don't normally do...'Bugs" and peer pressure?  I wish they could make the roaches self destruct themselves! OK that was mean..but it's better than any pesticide I would say!.. I just hope they don't turn the roaches into monsters. I wouldn't want to see a multi-talented roach with any more abilities to survive than as is...

here you go:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/science/16roach.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Image via Wikipedia

This intelligence is the result of information that is transferred to the other members of the swarm. This information transfer can be done two different ways :

1. stigmergy : indirect communication based on modification of the environment. For example ants, who deposit a trail of pheromones on their way, to lead the other ants to the food source
2. direct communication : honeybees who exhibit a particular dance to show the direction and distance of the food source to the other bees.

In artificial swarm intelligence several algorithms have been developed to copy this swarm intelligence mechanisms for data mining purposes.

Here I want to go a little further than just ants and honeybees and see if other swarm animals can offer some ways to develop swarm intelligence algorithms.

I already mentioned ants and honeybees.
In a post a while ago I also wrote that one of the algorithms used in the experimental software Antminer+ more mimics the behaviour of locusts than that of ants.
If we zoom in on locusts, how could these animals transfer their information to other locusts ? By stigmergy. As ants only deposit pheromone to indicate the path, artificial locusts (not real ones) have to do better than that : as locusts jump from one place to the other, the previous locust has to indicate the direction where to jump and eventually the distance of the jump, in order to get to a good spot. This complicates the life of the locusts a bit, because they have to come back each time to leave their information in the previous spot. But it could work.
So you can see that locusts and honeybees sort of communicate the address of the good spot to their swarm fellows.
There is yet another animal species that does this in a even more accurate way : homo sapiens. We, humans.
So why not build a swarm intelligence algorithm where people come back from, say a shopping trip, and write down the address of the store where it is cheap, or good quality, or whatever is favorable.
As in any swarm intelligence algorithm there is some incertainty about all this information transfer, so that the others arrive approximately on the spot, but eventually also look in the neighbourhood.

And just another thought : why in stead of only communicating info of the favorable spots, should we not also communicate info of the particularly bad spots, in order to get others to avoid those spots and do not waste any time there when they do some random searching?

Damn Foolishness #1: In this week's obvious "Present Tense" story, Russian tanks have entered the capital of South Ossetia in Georgia. Georgia has accused Russia of arming the South Ossetian separatists, who have been trying to break away since a civil war in the 1990s. Moscow denies this claim, and asserts that they're sending in the T-80s to "defend Russian citizens" in the region. On the other side, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili says that any involvement by Russian forces in the conflict will result in "all out war". He might just be trying to crowbar his way into NATO, and into their sphere of military support, but the threat is relevant. After all, it's not like any of this has gone wrong before, has it? Update: dirty little war. Update 2: Seems to be over. A shameless, brief, gutsy power play. 

Damn Foolishness #2: So, how smart are you? By yourself, I mean. Rusty looks pretty clever for finding the image at right, but how much credit can he really claim? How much of our intelligence is taught? How much is collective? Read a recent National Geographic about Swarm Theory for insights.

The concept is not an alien one to StarCraft players, but not everyone knows just how much this burdgeoning approach is already in use;

"in Italy and Switzerland, fleets of trucks carrying milk and dairy products, heating oil, and groceries all use ant-foraging rules to find the best routes for deliveries. In England and France, telephone companies have made calls go through faster on their networks by programming messages to deposit virtual pheromones at switching stations, just as ants leave signals for other ants to show them the best trails."

The tech is already here, helping us lowly individuals do everything from deliver dairy to program Lord of the Rings battle sequences.

Damn Foolishness #3: We all know that PH loves nothing more than a good face-kicking. In the following clip we examing the deep, almost philosophical foolishness of stepping into a ring with Mirko "CroCop" Filipović, who has a head-seeking missile instead of a left foot. Nice.

Updates: Thermoptics? Maybe. Also: there's a new comix link.

1. IF 5050, Teori Komputasi, 3 sks
2. IF 5051, Arsitektur Komputer Lanjut, 3 sks

Selain dari dua mata kuliah wajib, di kurikulum 2008 sudah bisa mengambil mata kuliah pilihan (di kurikulum sebelumnya semester awal berisi 4 mata kuliah wajib saja). Karena kebanyakan mata kuliah pilihan sudah pernah di ambil waktu S1 (hehe.. dulu saya tidak mengambil mata kuliah di luar program studi), akhirnya saya mengambil mata kuliah berikut.

1. IF 5059, Topik khusus Sains Komputer 2, 2 sks
2. IF 6055, Sistem Berkinerja tinggi, 2 sks
3. IF 6057, Intelejensia Kolektif, 2 sks

Ketiga mata kuliah pilihan tersebut yang menjadi warna untuk perjalanan semester ini. Topik Khusus 2 membahas tentang Multi-Agent System, Sistem Berkinerja Tinggi (High Performance System) membahas tentang Komputasi dan Pemrograman Komputer Paralel, sedangkan intelejensia kolektif saya masih belum paham, tapi kalau menebak dari dosen yang mengajar sepertinya akan membahas masalah Swarm Intelligence. Persamaan dari ketiga mata kuliah ini adalah ketiganya membahas tentang himpunan objek yang berinteraksi.

Setelah saya sedikit gugling, jadi bingung membedakan antara multi-agent system, swarm intelligence, dan collective intelligence. Ada yang bisa membantu menjelaskan?

It all started with an article I stumbled across about five psychological experiments in history that have revealed a dark and terrible side to human kind. A side that has long interested me and driven me to explore, mostly through my own musings, what causes people to be so persistently stupid and cruel. Topics like cowardice, sadism, and blind conformity. Especially blind conformity. That topic alone has absolutely fascinated and frustrated me since I was in elementary school, and forced to attend and conform to a dogmatic church festering in the abuse of "spiritual authority" which I now realize was much more of a cult than anything else.

My bitterness towards religion aside, or rather emphasized, this article caught my eye because it addressed many of the things I experienced while attending that church as a child. Stay with me, because it's kind of a long thought process. It starts out with something called the Asch Conformity Experiment, in which extremely simple eye tests are performed on groups, All but one of the participants are told to lie about their answers as a unanimous front, and the reaction of the one real participant is then observed. When the participants are alone and opposed by the group, despite being obviously wrong, just over thirty percent of the subjects would go along with the group.

This means that one third of mankind is so pressured to conform by a vast majority that even when they are 100%, without a doubt wrong, they will conform.

Now there are various reasons for conformity, for the sake of this particular line of thought, we'll stick to informational influence and normative influence. With normative influence people conform to a group to be liked or accepted by the group, while with informative influence they turn to the group for information, and conform their actions or opinions because the group convinces them they are correct.

Another series of tests was conducted with an eyewitness identification task, participants were shown a suspect individually and then in a lineup of other suspects. In the tests the participant groups were shown an individual, and then had to identify him together in a lineup. One test gave the participants only one second to look at the lineup, and another made it easier. In both tests two groups were formed, and one was fed a story that would make them believe their answers were very important for the legal field, and the other knew they were merely in a clinical trial.

When the task was made easy, those who most wanted to be accurate conformed less of the time (16%) than those who didn't feel their answers were important (33%). This would suggest that for non core beliefs, apathy promotes conformity 33% of the time. However when the task was made more difficult, Those who wanted to be most accurate conformed 51% of the time as opposed to 35% in the other group. This would suggest (to me at least, this is where I start extrapolating my own ideas) that for core beliefs, and important issues that fall somewhere in the grey zone of life, for times when an issue matters to someone, but they aren't sure exactly what to think themselves, that 51% will go along with the public opinion in their group. It suggests that when we are confronted with complicated moral issues, we are most succeptable to informational influence.

Now a group can be any size, whether it be a particular demograph, or a culture, a country, religion, or political group. It could just be your friends, or family. Let's use politics for an example, because it's easy to see in society. If a political group can popularize their cause or opinions, then half of everyone who believes their cause matters will go along with whatever the majority says, and one third of everyone who doesn't think the cause matters will go along with the majority too. You can see how this could quickly spiral out of control, with a very small minority of core believers highly influencing what soon becomes the vast majority of the whole society, turning an issue that could easily be completely incorrect (coughglobalwarmingcough) into majority supported law, merely on the basis of fancy words and the highly submissive and easily influenced subconscious mind of what (in my assessment) boils down to the majority of human kind.

The next study that fascinated me was the Milgram Experiment, where the subject was told he was a "teacher" and that his job was to give a memory test to another subject, located in another room. The whole thing was fake and the other subject was an actor. The subject was told that whenever the other guy gave an incorrect answer, he was to press a button that would give him an electric shock. A guy in a lab coat was there to make sure he did it, but of course the other subject was not really being shocked. The subject was told that the shocks started at 45 volts and would increase with every wrong answer. Each time they pushed the button, the actor on the other end would scream and beg for the subject to stop. Eventually the actor would stop his screams and only silence would come from the other room, but the test subject would be told to continue his shocks.

Between 61 and 66 percent of subjects would continue the experiment until it reached the maximum voltage of 450. (by the way, for those of you not blue collar types who may go through life without getting shocked much, that's a fuck ton more electricity than it takes to kill someone) In another test the training procedure was repeated with a puppy, and real shocks. 20 out of 26 people took it to the highest setting.

As funny as that mental image may be, the implication of the test was that when told by a person in a position of authority, in this case the scientist in the lab coat, almost 80 percent of people would gladly kill a puppy, and 61-65 percent would kill a stranger. Let that sink in for a second, 65 percent of people are willing to kill a stranger if "the man" tells them to. For a scientific test, not even a holy war. This explains a lot of the psychology behind the third Reich, and religious extremism. Not just terrorists all you Jerry Falwell loving, rock and roll hating, gay protesting, bible thumping bitches. I mean you and your stupid ass church-state aspirations too. Your pastor could be "the man" for you, and we'll get to you pastor with my next experiment.

The last experiment was the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this students from Standford were set up with the role of prisoners and guards. The basement of a building was built into a prison, and the guards were instructed not to use physical violence, but to make sure they kept law and order in the prison. It was supposed to last two weeks.

After the first day the prisoners, in retaliation towards the guard highly abusive behavior, staged a revolt and barricaded themselves in their cells. In the following days the guards punished the prisoners by stripping them naked, denying them access to a bathroom, waking them at all hours for forced exercise, degrading verbal abuse, and humiliating physical mockery. After four days four of the prisoners had broken down from stress and had to be released. By the sixth day everyone involved in the experiment, including the professor who ran it, had completely lost contact with reality, and had assumed the roles they were playing. Other staff objected to the point that the experiment had to be shut down.

I found a half hour documentary on the tests, and I highly recommend that anyone interested in psychology, human morality, or the prison system watch it. The three videos on YouTube are located here:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Anyway, these series of experiments into human behavior got me thinking. If a small majority can use the subconscious tendencies of the majority to gain power, (Asch conformity test) and the overwhelming majority of people will willingly obey those in power even when strongly in conflict with their own morals, (Milgram Experiment) and being in a position of power has such a corrupting and evil influence when put in the context of volatile or stressful situations, like prison, (Stanford Prison Experiment) or for the sake of argument, any similar situation where the people not in power are perceived as being dangerous, rebellious, or in some way in need of firm control, what does that say about mankind and our history, or our current social and political state of affairs? In test after test after test I ran across, most people were not only unwilling to stand up to tyranny and unethical behavior, but not even willing to help out their fellow man when it would take little or no effort. Are we inherently evil? Is all power on our planet simply decided by which extreme minority is capable of convincing the people too stupid or submissive to think for themselves? Can I even be sure that my own views are something I really believe in, or merely just me conforming to various beliefs held by other people?

Or is this dark, sometimes destructive behavior something more. What good thing could come from having a human species consisting of 90% sheep and 10% sheep dogs? After thinking this over and over, I am filled with a desire to behave out of my own individualism. I've always had anti establishment, and nonconformist tendencies, but at the same time I can look at my own life and observe conformity from my own beliefs in clear bold type throughout my life. I've worn stupid clothes to try and fit in. I've done things I don't enjoy doing to make friends and impress women. I've even found myself occasionally swayed by clearly retarded political and religious philosophies. I won't lie, I have been a sheep more often than I would like. And the numbers are not on my side. So what good thing could possibly come from most everyone living a life that isn't theirs?

Well what if this conformist to individualist ratio we find in humans is part of a greater purpose? What if it is a subconscious self protection mechanism that has been instilled in mankind to benefit our species as a whole, a form of swarm intelligence that allows our species to survive?

Maybe if everyone was prone to think for themselves, and act on their own beliefs and desires all the time without a high level of conformity, then mankind would not be capable of forming functioning societies of any size. We could be thrown into anarchy, tribalism, or driven to extinction by unchecked vigilantism and violence. Perhaps the majority of people conform to other peoples values and ideas instinctively so that mankind is capable of forming cooperative groups: countries, companies, religions, maybe even ultimately a global union. Maybe on a primitive survival level it doesn't matter if blind conformity leads to war, turmoil, and genocide. Maybe it's better for our overall survival to have anyone in control of everyone, than to have everyone in control of no one.

So the question then comes, how important is individuality. I highly value mine, I'm assuming you value yours. Most everyone feels unique and to some degree wants to establish a firm self image and not be some worker drone. I would say that most of the really good things in history and human advancement, along with the really bad, have been born out of the individual thinkers. Those who had an idea and refused to listen to anyone else till it had become a reality. But if everyone was a free thinker, could society function? Without being a bunch of mindless followers, would we be spear chucking cave people? Screw that.

I don't know. I have no answer for that question. I want to be individual, but at the same time I can respect some societies and organizations that are bigger than me and require my subordination to achieve something I alone could not. I don't know if it's better to be a follower and think you are individual, or be a freethinker and know everyone else is retarded.

I have a headache now. That was way, way, way too deep to be thinking on a Tuesday night. Now it's your turn. If you actually made it all the way through that, what's your take on conformity, authority, leadership, and the role we all play as an alleged individual? Does it matter? Am I completely wrong in my analysis? Are you individual despite what the numbers science has come up with say? Are you unknowingly just a tool for someone else? Hit me back, I want feedback.

Err ..... uh ..... informational influence? DAMMIT!!! Ignorance was bliss after all.

Note: For people who are  not interested in technical details can skip those parts and only read the stuff in bold there.

Franz Kafka is one writer whose works have had a profound impact on me in terms that they disturbed me each time I thought about them. No, not because of his writings per se ONLY but for a greater part because i had read a lot on his rather tragic life and i saw a heart breaking reflection in his works of what happened in his life (i see a lot of similarities between Kafka's life and that of Premchand albeit that Premchand's work got published in his lifetime mostly, though he got true critical acclaim after his death). Yes i do think that his writings give a good picture of Europe at that time, on human needs and behavior, but the prior reason outweighs all these. Kafka remains one of my favorite writers, though his works are basically short stories. He mostly wrote on a theme that emphasized the alienation of man and the indifferent society. Kafka's tormenting thoughts on dehumanization, the cruel world, bureaucratic labyrinths which he experienced as being part of the not so liked Jewish minority in Prague, his experiences in jobs he did, his love life and affairs, on a constant fear of mental and physical collapse as a result of clinical depression and the ill health that he suffered from, reflected in a lot of his works. Including in his novella The Metamorphosis.

W. H Auden rightly wrote about Kafka:

"Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of the modern man"

In metamorphosis the protagonist Gregor Samsa turns into a giant insect when he wakes up one morning. It is kind of apparent that the "transformation" was meant in a metaphorical sense by Kafka and not in a literal one, mostly based on his fears and his own life experiences. The Novella starts like this. . .

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

--

While rummaging through a few scientific papers that explored the problem of pattern recognition using a distributed approach i came across a few by Dr Ramos et al, which dealt with the issue using the artificial colonies approach.

In the previous post i had mentioned that the self organization of neurons into a brain like structure and the self organization of an ant colony were similar in more than a few ways. If it may be implemented then it could have implications in pattern recognition problems, where the perceptive abilities emerge from the local and simple interactions of simple agents. Such decentralized systems, a part of the swarm intelligence paradigm look very promising in applying to pattern recognition and the specific case of image segmentation as basically these may be considered a clustering and combinatorial problem taking the image itself as an ant colony habit.

The basis for this post was laid down in the previous post on colony cognitive maps. We observed the evolution of a pheromonal field there and a simple model for the same:

[Evolution of a distribution of (artificial) ants over time: Image Source]

Click to Enlarge

The above is the evolution of the distribution of artificial ants in a square lattice, this work has been extended to digital image lattices by Ramos et al. Image segmentation is an image processing problem wherein the regions of the image under consideration may be partitioned into different regions. Like into areas of low contrast and areas of high contrast, on basis of texture and grey level and so on. Image segmentation is very important as the output of an image segmentation process may be used as an input in object recognition based scenarios. The work of Ramos et al (In references below) and some of the papers cited in his works have really intrigued me and i would strongly suggest readers to have a look at them if at all they are interested in image segmentation, pattern recognition and self organization in general, some might also be interested in implementing something similar too!

--

In one of the papers a swarm of artificial ants was thrown on a digital habitat (an image of Albert Einstein) to explore it for 1000 iterations. The Einstein image is replaced by a map image. The evolution of the colony cognitive maps for the Einstein image habitat is shown below for various iterations.

[Evolution of a pheromonal field on an Einstein image habitat for t= 0, 1, 100, 110, 120, 130, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, 800, 900, 1000: Image Source]

The above is represented most aptly in a .gif image.

[Evolution of a pheromonal field on an Einstein habitat: Image Source]

Now instead of Einstein a Kafka image was taken and was subject to the same. Image Source

The Kafka image habitat is replaced by a red ant. The abstract of the paper by the same name goes as.

Created with an Artificial Ant Colony, that uses images as Habitats, being sensible to their gray levels. At the second row,  Kafka is replaced as a substrate, by Red Ant. In black, the higher levels of pheromone (a chemical evaporative sugar substance used by swarms on their orientation trough out the trails). It’s exactly this artificial evaporation and the computational ant collective group synergy reallocating their upgrades of pheromone at interesting places, that allows for the emergence of adaptation and “perception” of new images. Only some of the 6000 iterations processed are represented. The system does not have any type of hierarchy, and ants communicate only in indirect forms, through out the successive alteration that they found on the Habitat.

Now what intrigues me is that out of all the things why did the Kafka image have to be replaced by an insect, something similar as was written in metamorphosis which was Kafka's own predicament!

Extremely intriguing!

--

Resources on Franz Kafka:

1. A Brief Biography

2. The Metamorphosis At Project Gutenberg. Click here >>

3. The Kafka Project

References and STRONGLY recommended papers:

1. Artificial Ant Colonies in Digital Image Habitats - A Mass behavior Effect Study on Pattern Recognition. Vitorino Ramos and Filipe Almeida. Click Here >>

2. Social Cognitive Maps, Swarms Collective Perception and Distributed Search on Dynamic Landscapes. Vitorino Ramos, Carlos Fernandes, Agostinho C. Rosa. Click Here >>

3. Self-Regulated Artificial Ant Colonies on Digital Image Habitats. Carlos Fernandes, Vitorino Ramos, Agostinho C. Rosa. Click Here >>

4. On the Implicit and the Artificial - Morphogenesis and Emergent Aesthetics in Autonomous Collective Systems. Vitorino Ramos. Click Here >>

5. A Strange Metamorphosis [Kafka to Red Ant], Vitorino Ramos.

Onionesque Reality Home >>