What is Digg?97 Comments
- hydroplane, on 10/11/2007, -2/+27Protect the Queen!
- bluegender, on 10/11/2007, -1/+19"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals and you know it." Agent K
- mcm297, on 10/11/2007, -0/+17Great article. It's amazing how so many things from nature can be simulated with evolutionary computing: genetic algorithms, ant colony optimization, swarm intelligence, artificial immune systems. Some of the most difficult optimization problems have been attacked using these methods.
- bluegender, on 10/11/2007, -0/+16Shut up and read, LEARN something for once.
- luet, on 10/11/2007, -2/+18Anarchism works with ants. It can't work with concious/pseudo-concious beings like humans though. Ants don't ask questions or try to see the big picture. Maybe if humans were handicapped it would work but then we'd just be as stupid as ants, wouldn't we?
- superyounan1, on 10/11/2007, -0/+12a single neuron in a brain isn't smart, it just sends electrical signals from one of its many nodes to another. Together though they make up a very complex mesh capable of amazing computation and analytical processes. Maybe storms do something similar, take simple little operations and group them together into a more complex thing
- slapded, on 10/11/2007, -2/+11I'm the queen!
- hiPpymIck, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9yessir
- Verven, on 10/11/2007, -2/+10Which one's the queen?!
- unknownunknowns, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9This is why BitTorrent is one of the greatest human inventions of all time.
A great book on tech and self-organization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9WE ARE THE BORG
- DarkHumour, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7Seen it in action at Walmart round the cookie aisle.
- bluegender, on 10/11/2007, -3/+10If people were to swarm, the I.Q. would actually lower.
- StyxUT, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7Seems to me that Digg is based on swarm intelligence. Thousands of worker "ants" scowering the internet for interesting stories, then bringing them back to the hive. We all know what happens from there.
- Pissoff, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6I'm pretty sure that is exactly how storms work *nod*.
- iamorlando, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7Thats funny, the more people are in a group, the stupider they become. Maybe we should learn from insect inteligence
- Kerrigore, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6I was just thinking that. I just finished that book yesterday, and then this article shows up on Digg. COINCIDENCE OR CONSPIRACY? You decide.
- Psych77, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5Not necessarily The stock market appeared to accurately predict the cause of the Challenger disaster within hours of it happening. Crowd intelligence studies are constantly ongoing and it appears that in some circumstances a random collection of people, or even a selected group of individuals with no knowledge in a field can provide more accurate answers than experts. A reference for example: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/
- hfactor, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Hardly anarchism when everybody is hardwired to follow the "law".
- thirdeyeopen, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4*sigh
- aadnk, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4It's not without problems, however. I'm especially concerned of the fact that Digg allows members to track the behavior of ALL the others in the group - that is, by seeing the amount of diggs a story has received. This could result in people digging a story just because it's popular, and not doing their part of judging its worthiness. As the article puts it:
"Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won't be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it's made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part. " - unknownunknowns, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Anarchism works fine with small groups of people. When you hang out with your friends, no one is the leader (and if someone is, remind me not to hang out with them). But, humans have a wide variety of social organizations, most of which are oppressive and have developed a lot of complexity over time.
- NerdyNinja, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Fine, allow me to rephrase. Let's form a decentralized government based off swarm theory and bittorrent.
And blue - that's the quote I was trying to remember - good call. - Leomarth, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4Because none of us is as dumb as all of us.
- brian1625, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software, by Steven Johnson is a good book on the subject.
- jhaks, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4@ slaveboy2203
This is the whole point of the article. Just because the a system is complicated and displays intelligence or looks to be "intelligently designed" does not make it so. Complicated systems can arise from simple interactions. The only reason we believe in intelligent design is because we're stuck trying to explain something complex that is dramatically counter intuitive with respect to our reasoning. We are singular organisms that think singularly so it is hard to see things from a larger perspective. Sure it's easy just to say "oh some dude high up in the sky must have created this thing I don't comprehend", but it doesn't make it true.
End Rant. - AngryVoklav, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Suggested reading on this topic: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter
- LDawg, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Right, that why i said "+ nano-technology" meaning either is fine by itself =)
- shadowspawn, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3This is what the internet has helped create, by the way. There are two poles for this theory... and if you look at humans and instant communications...
- xtmno3, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Not to mention we love to label ourselves and others for easy categorization as us or them. Adding 50 ways to find differences between yourself and someone else allows you 50 reasons to fight with them, or try to control them as they are inferior.
- Nekronaut, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2This reminds me of a very special demotivators poster.
http://www.demotivators.com/idiocy.html - yatoobin, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2it's nice to see mother nature uses bittorrent.
- sexydawg, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Whoever thinks that there is intelligence in numbers obviously didn't see the "addoneword.com" story posted yesterday...
- geminitojanus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3One could argue government is a form of self organization. The problem is, governmental organization is much more permanent than it should be these days, and too few government workers are worried about the good of the collective instead of the good of the people giving them money. Ants don't have much intelligence, so they don't accept bribes (oh I'm sorry, "Campaign Contributions"), humans do.
- kd1s, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2As much as I consider this very cool research, I wish the military didn't get hold of it. Well, I'm a bit ambivalent about that to be honest. If we could spare human life I'm all for it.
But this swarm behavior thing smacks of Skynet. - bIuebonics, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2"and awesome social networking websites."
and have you not witnessed the stupidity that has arisen from these "social networking websites"? - qhor, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2From Page 3 of this article:
"The decisive moment didn't take place in the main cluster of bees, but out at the boxes, where scouts were building up. As soon as the number of scouts visible near the entrance to a box reached about 15—a threshold confirmed by other experiments—the bees at that box sensed that a quorum had been reached, and they returned to the swarm with the news.
"It was a race," Seeley says. "Which site was going to build up 15 bees first?""
From http://digg.com/software/What_happens_if_everyone_adds_one_word_to_a_story :
"There is a list of words in red after the last word added to the story, all of which are words which have been submitted by users. Each of these can be voted on, and the first word to get 15 votes will be added to the end of the story."
The difference being that the bees don't come up with sentences like: "You all fail at making any sense whatsoever, so I am changing the subject to ponies." - daphreak, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2So now when the robots take over we will need an Ender rather than a Neo.
- CorpT, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Have you found a subject you can't inject Ubuntu fanboi-ism into?
- denimvest, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3No you're not!
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1LIVE FOR THE SWARM
- Chubakkaz, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2designed you say.
- DatuPuti, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1"good of the collective" sounds like communism
- SamKellett, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Psychohistory anyone?
"You can't predict what one person will do, but you can predict what millions will do" - NerdyNinja, on 10/11/2007, -11/+12This only tells me one thing - we don't need the gooberment. If ANTS can figure out self-organization, we oughta be able to do it too!
- xpankrat, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2LOL .. whoever's digging the parent comment down .. it is programmer's comment, not a religious one
- jasebud, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Don't forget to take a look at the photo gallery (http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0707/feature5/gallery1.html).
- xpankrat, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Not sure if that one had any intelligence to it though.
More like a Brownian motion around the attractor. - jasebud, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Awesome. Make sure to take the time to read the article and digest the message.
- Chubakkaz, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1exactly! don't you see the ants on myspace doing the same meaningless crap so efficiently that the site is worth a load now.
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