The origins and evolution of human intelligence: parasitic insects? viruses? mushrooms? neural darwinism? foraging? machiavellian competition? emergence? or something else?
posted by MetaMonkey on Jul 24, 2006 - 26 comments

"Conversation will improve, language barriers will fall, artificial intelligence will begin to emerge, and, hopefully, people will be more honest about what they want and who they want to have sex with." If you could meta-tag a tag itself, would the resulting "tagweb" mirror how we collectively organize thoughts in our [collective] brain? (via del.icio.us)
posted by acid freaking on the kitty on Feb 3, 2005 - 17 comments

Exploring Emergence. [Java]
posted by Gyan on Aug 30, 2004 - 8 comments

A self-organising electronic circuit has stunned engineers by turning itself into a radio receiver. It was supposed to evolve into an oscillator (through a genetic algorithm). This is astonishing and shows the power of evolutionary algorithms... [via missing matter]
posted by talos on Oct 7, 2002 - 32 comments

"The Web, left to its own devices, would be the exact opposite of that: It's like a giant city with no neighborhoods; it needs these kind of meta-filters, these second-level kind of things, whether it is Yahoo or Google or Slashdot, to rein in that chaos and turn it to something more organized." From the second page of an interview with the author of Emergence, Steven Johnson (also co-founder of Feed).
posted by adrianhon on Nov 28, 2001 - 10 comments