voice of humanity: Peter Small's Stigmergic Systems Site    
 Peter Small's Stigmergic Systems Site9 comments
picture30 Oct 2003 @ 14:23, by Roger Eaton

This is the first of a series of Link Reviews, short descriptions of websites and weblog entries that relate to the voice of humanity project.

Stigmergy is coordination via changes to the environment. For instance, ants leave trails that have a meaning to other ants. Like maybe, "here I am leaving this trail coming home with a nice chunk of hotdog bun; check it out!" As more ants follow up, the trail becomes stronger, attracting yet more followers. Simple local rules for the individual add up to complex social behavior. One application to the web is in the way links add up in Google's PageRank algorithm. Every web link is another human ant strengthening the trail. Joe Gregorio has a blog article along these lines. But Peter Small, at his Stigmergic Systems site, has another idea.

Small's notion is to use website log analysis, which tracks a user through the website noting times and links followed, and user input to automatically evolve a website. Frankly, there is less than meets the eye in his involved explanations, but there is no denying how very curious is the idea he is pursuing. The whole site evolves! The structure of the site, the look of the site and the structure of the content as provided by user input, all change randomly. User reaction to the new design is captured in the website logs and analyzed to decide if the change was beneficial. If so, then the change is kept, else discarded. That is the simple idea behind it, anyway.

Peter Small's notion to evolve a website on the basis of user interaction can be applied to the metaweb.

Each entrance to the metaweb will be a link from a home page for a particular category of the voh (voice of humanity) network. The metaweb link should lead to a set of portal pages that mediate between the category homepage and the metaweb. These portal pages need to be highly automated, based on the ratings and input of the users who pass through the portal. Portal link categories should evolve both automatically and via human input by users, perhaps free wiki-like human input or perhaps more constrained human input as in Peter Small's agents in a box -- or both.



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9 comments

31 Oct 2003 @ 16:20 by ming : Stigmergy
Sounds like something I'd need special glasses for. Sounds great. I don't get how he would do it. But I'm sure I want it in one form or another.

But the site changing randomly and then seeing if it is beneficial? Hm, I have a hard time seeing how that can be really practical.  

27 Nov 2003 @ 22:59 by Peter Small @213.48.202.55 : Stigmergic systems
Unfortunately, the impression seems to have come across that this is a randomly changing Web site that evolves as a result of tracking users. This is totally wrong. Users are not tracked and the changes are not random.
The update of the site on 29th November 2003 might make this clearer as it shows how it is a distributed system that coordinates human input from many different sources (see the SEO project).
Biological systems appear to be random, but in fact they are directional as explained in the section "Controlling complexity".

Peter Small  

2 Dec 2003 @ 20:32 by roger eaton @209.55.71.129 : random changes indadequate to explain
> directional

I think it is fascinating what you are doing, but I do wish you would explain with less of the Oz trappings. You know, the man behind the curtain at the Emerald City. More about how it actually works, and less about the theory of Kempelen boxes. I say this because I do think you are really doing something but your presentation makes it impossible to see exactly what. How do you actually winnow your group of selected agents? Is it by your own subjective choice? Is it automatic? If so what are the parameters that reduce the colony of ants to a few that you are going to follow? Is it still stigmergy if you don't use the trails from all the ants?

On your {link:http://www.stigmergicsystems.com/seoproject/seostigmergy.html|Seo Stigmergy page} you use figure 3 as an explanation of filtering, but it explains nothing, not to me anyway. Figure five says "information providers are selected on the basis of their expertise and the relevancy and suitability of the information they point to." But it begs the question when you don't say who or what selects the information providers based on exactly what definition of expterise, relevancy and suitablity. If it is you behind the process doing the selection, well then we are just getting your informed opinion, not a stigmergic result.  

12 Dec 2008 @ 06:47 by tibet tour @118.113.9.227 : tibet
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30 Dec 2008 @ 23:48 by 綾瀬はるか @61.210.115.201 : thanks
nice site. thanks.  

11 May 2009 @ 13:13 by online games @122.242.146.27 : I do think you are really doing somethin
I do think you are really doing something but your presentation makes it impossible to see exactly what. How do you actually winnow your group of selected agents? Is it by your own subjective choice? Is it automatic? If so what are the parameters that reduce the colony of ants to a few that you are going to follow?  

8 Jun 2009 @ 06:04 by jewelry @218.19.53.159 : pearl
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