Notes

=Notes=

Self-organization is a foundational characteristic of everything within our purview. The cosmos is self-organizing: it grew from a singular point to an estimated 150 billion light-years in diameter in the span of approximately 13.7 billion years. Life is self-organizing. In the presumed absence of divine intervention, the first living cells emerged 700 million years after the Earth formed. Life and the planet have co-evolved in the ensuing 3.8 billion years, giving rise to a third major self-organizing entity, mind. Mind has spawned a forth major development: technology.

Human technology cannot truly be characterized as self-organizing, although there are areas in which it is becoming so. Advances in software design and robotics have pointed toward a wisdom that the universe has always possessed: optimal existence results from evolution and self-organization. Evolutionary computation, machine learning, artificial life, complexity theory and swarm computing all borrow heavily from the foundational characteristics of the universe, life, and mind.

One of the more compelling paradigms to arise from the computing revolution is virtuality. This is not a new concept, as the arts and literature have a legacy of created worlds within the pages of a book, the proscenium arch, and the frame of a canvas. Computational virtuality, however, takes the paradigm much further. Immersion is the hallmark of this arena. It can be all encompassing, as with the head-mounted displays of virtual reality, or more modest (yet, arguably, of near-equal effect) as with the widespread adaptation of MMORPGs for common personal and mobile computing platforms. Computational virtuality is also open-ended: games can be scripted (to a degree) but virtual worlds are largely stochastic, with elements of free will and non-determinism that roughly parallel real life.

As our knowledge-modeling tools evolved from myth, scripture, and philosophy to the scientific method, our models of the universe also evolved. Leading-edge theoretical physics takes us beyond the twin 20th century revolutions of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity to String Theory, M-Theory and other models that will inevitably arise in the search for a unified theory of all of creation. The trajectory of this evolution has brought the Newtonian 'background' universe into the foreground, relativizing and quantizing its myriad components into a seamless fabric of reality. Our bodies are made of the same quantum stuff as stars and planets; our minds and consciousness emerge from that self-same substrate.

Mapping the progress of virtual worlds to this trajectory, virtuality remains in a Newtonian universe. The virtual world is a passive background to we the 'players'. Worse, it is more stage set than city street, more painted backdrop than landscape, more prop than tool. Granted it is a social environment that dissolves geographic distance and has tremendous potential for teaching and learning - but the environment itself does not evolve; it does not surprise us with emergent wonders; it does not //live//.

What if the 'world' in virtual worlds could borrow from the playbook of our world? What if it could evolve, self-organize, and spawn life and mind? Algorithms that facilitate these principles (albeit imperfectly) exist and enjoy a level of relative maturity in the domain of artificial intelligence. And what are virtual worlds, if not code? Apart from the inputs of its human participants, a virtual world is 100% code (and data), and subject to the same manipulations and innovations as any other code base. If code can predict stock market trends, win at chess and jeopardy, drive a car or a mars rover, model global weather and more, can it not be coaxed to apply existing self-organizational and evolutionary algorithms to the creation and ongoing development of a virtual world?

(talk about NPCs -- non-player characters as a possible beginning in this direction)

(scenario of __growing__ a virtual world from a set of 'seed' parameters)

(after establishing that a VW can emulate our world, then posit how it can __move beyond__ the restrictions of our world and exploit the power of virtuality and code and NPIRL)

(need examples of self-organizing groups both outside of and within virtual worlds...I want to get to the point eventually that as long as virtual worlds remain static, passive backdrops to 'players' they will lose ground to other paradigms, such as social networks -- because look, Facebook is an active player, its suggesting things, blabbing all your secrets to the world, connecting people and code, growing, spreading like a slime mold across the noosphere)

This is the starting point for SOV, the jumping off point. Perhaps this is one way that the universe procreates – it spawns life, which spawns mind, which spawns technology which spawns virtuality wherein an infinite variety of potential environments are possible – but they aren’t environments for bodies to inhabit, they are environments for minds. And because they are the dwelling place of minds, they can be infinitely more plastic, variable, phantasmic. None of the constraints of biological life exist; inhabitants don’t need to breathe, to eat, to sleep. These are shared playworlds for minds that can adapt dynamically and interactively with the participating minds.
 * Universe / Life / Mind / Technology ( / Virtuality)**

These worlds interact with minds, but not only minds. They can interact with the digital artifacts of minds: texts, narratives, 2 and 3 dimensional art and animation, architectural and mathematical models etc.

The virtual world can manifest differently for each participant..

The virtual world can evolve in real time shaped by the ‘fitness’ of its manifestations and interactions with participants.. Thereby continuously self-optimizing based on feedback and forming a kaleidoscopic dynamic utopia that is uniquely tailored to each moment in time and each unique gestalt of participants..

So the virtual world is constantly evolving in order to maximize fitness, its own survivial, and the survival of its genotype (need to define this further) It is not unreasonable to postulate the survival of a virtual world by the number of active participants it has. Zero participants = dead world. And more participants means more diversity, more ‘success’ and the possiblity of new resources (and reproduction? spinoffs?)

So the virtual world’s fitness is its ability to keep its participants (stickiness) and to gain more participants. Participants stick because the world is interesting and a static backdrop is only interesting for so long and then its on to the next big thing (Facebook?) Participants join because of word of mouth, advertising, media attention generated by the interest of earlier participants.

Interest could be fostered in at least 2 ways: 1) the world itself and its contents are interesting and dynamical (changing, evolving, not static) 2) participants make new connections with other participants who are interesting (social network). If the world were able to foster both of these it would increase its own potential to survive, thrive and reproduce. Note: Learning is inherently interesting. This may account for the way SL has become less of a mass social phenomenon but has engendered a healthy academic community world-wide.

Need to talk about what makes virtual worlds different from flat social networks like Facebook, and gives them almost infinitely more potential. The decline in interest in virtual worlds and the massive upswing in interest in Facebook speaks volumes about the need for SOVs (the less deterministic the better, need to make the argument for this).

Deterministically designed virtual worlds are one person’s or one team’s vision of an interesting, compelling immersive experience. But wouldn’t a much more efficient determinant of these factors be a real-time, always-on feedback mechanism between the virtual world and its participants, both individually and collectively? I would think the gaming world would aready be moving toward this with NPC’s etc.

A true self-organizing virtuality might prove daunting to realize in code. Worse, it might prove completely unusable for human participants. Hence a modular approach to engineering self-organization in virtual worlds is perhaps desirable. A modular approach would encapsulate self-organizing principles within specific domains of the virtuality. Two existing computing paradigms: genetic programming (for the fitness algorithm that wraps around everything) and cellular automata. (more to follow).
 * Engineering**

__Landscape__ How might the landscape of a virtuality be self-organizing? Cellular Automata come to mind.

A cellular automaton is a collection of "colored" cells on a [|grid] of specified shape that evolves through a number of discrete time steps according to a set of rules based on the states of neighboring cells. The rules are then applied iteratively for as many time steps as desired. - []

Cellular automata can manifest in 1, 2, 3 or more dimensions. Based purely on algorithms (rules) they propagate characteristics (colors, on/off states, etc) based on the conditions of neighboring cells. This can lead to a rich variety of patterns, oscillations and chaotic results. Each cell is like a computer in a network, as it carries out processing based on rules and the state of its environment thereby altering its environment, and this process is propagated throughout the environment.

A 3-dimensional virtual landscape could be constructed by cellular automata rules, with the individual cells of the automaton mapped to point locations in the XYZ axis of virtuality. What would this look like? Depending on the rules, it could look very much like a typical Earth landscape, or it could look quite alien. Imagine that the landscape, again based on rules (not a designer’s plan), could spawn ‘plants’ that would extrude from the substrate of the ground and propagate throughout the space above the ground. These plants might form complex branching networks that interconnect with other plants, spawn daughter plants, subdividing space and creating complex, living mazes through which avatars might wander.

The ‘ground’ of this landscape could be in constant flux, changing colors and shades and elevation, like an animated topographic map. Or parts of the landscape could be ‘frozen’ while other parts, according to rules (that might be arrived at via genetic programming, evolving algorithms based on ‘fitness’) might suddenly burst into morphogenic life, undulating and cycling through kaleidoscopic color and texture gradients as they manifested computational life. An avatar, wandering through this realm, wouldn’t know if the ground beneath his or her feet might at any moment become alive and cast them into a maelstrom of seismic proportions (while remaining perfectly safe on the other side of the screen or goggles, of course).

These landscapes, with their zones of dancing color, texture, elevation and plant life, could be subject to the same rules of evolution and fitness that govern the rest of the virtuality—if participants respond to the landscape and its rules, it will prosper. If participants avoid it, that particular set of rules will be discarded and other rules put forth in constant pursuit of maximum fitness.

__Cityscape__ __Morphologies__ __Artifacts__ __Communication__

__Society__

__Culture__

__Education__ Much as models and theories of the universe, life and mind have evolved from deterministic, top-down, theistic or pantheistic scenarios to non-deterministic, bottom-up, self-organizing and evolutionary scenarios, pedagogical theories have evolved from teacher-centric, one-way transmission of knowledge to learner-centric, networked exchange and creation of knowledge. Personal learning environments and personal learning networks are concepts that have gained traction in the wake of these trends in learning theory and the proliferation of digital networks and tools. These approaches to learning place the individual in the center, connected to an ever-expanding and changing cloud of tools, knowledge repositories and peers, much of which arises through serendipitous chains of association rather than as the result of a concerted, centrally designed initiative. Just as the internet has proliferated as a kudzu-like web of nodes and connectors, encircling the planet via high-speed telecommunication networks, submarine cables and communication satellites, so have myriad networks of teachers and learners (many fulfilling both roles simultaneously), piggybacking on the capabilities and programs of the web, mobile computing and communications, web 2.0 and web 3.0 (whatever that is) forming an intellectual superstructure, communicating, publishing and subscribing to a burgeoning, dynamic body of knowledge. Communities of practice and communities in the service of education and knowledge creation (often one and the same) form spontaneously in this ecosystem. Attempts at wholesale design and engineering of these entities routinely fail. "Much like a living organism, they (Communities of Practice) are self-organizing,a nd cannot be designed prima facie. They grow, evolve, and change dynamically, transcending any particular member and outliving any particular task." //-Desigining System Dualities// Sasha A. Barab, James G. MaKinster, and Rebecca Scheckler from Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning. Virtual worlds, like Second Life, provide fertile ground for teachers and learners to reach out and connect. Their presence embodied in avatars, participants can inhabit and traverse a symbolic landscape, interacting with other intelligences, both human and machine. Non-player characters (NPCs) are avatars with artificial intelligence that can interact with participant avatars, much like the classic artificial intelligence programs ELIZA and Racter, which can carry on conversations by processing key words and phrases of input and constructing semi-intelligable sentences that appear to respond and converse. A self-organizing virtual world for teachers and learners could grow with the participant communities, forming optimal environments for serendipitous connections and exchange of ideas based on seed parameters and evolutionary selection algorithms. Feedback from the communities to the virtuality in the form of statistics on connections made, communication load, rate of increase in membership etc. could feed into the evolutionary algorithms, discarding suboptimal and promoting optimal combinations, connections and knowledge creation rates. How would this be experienced by the participants? Consider a random walk across a sunny meadow in a virtual world. You chance upon an NPC who greets you cheerfully by name. This character knows a lot about you - your past actions, profile parameters and text messages have fed into the world's knowledge repository and this NPC is more or less a user interface (UI) into that repository and the algorithms that sit atop its knowledge base. "I have someone I'd like you to meet" says the NPC as it takes your hand and guides you down a path through the tall grass. You come to a clearing and there stands an avatar, guided there by her own seemingly random wanderings (made less random by the intentions of the world) who just happens to be a subject matter expert (SME) on that esoteric sub-discipline you've been wanting to explore but haven't had the time to make the right connections to do so. The NPC introduces you to the SME, then politely makes its exit. (NPC's are convenient interfaces for the world to communicate with human participants: they are embodied in avatars, like regular participants, and communicate via speech (synthesis) or text.) There's a wealth of value in this kind of 'chance' encounter: both you and your new found SME friend participate in this virtuality in order to teach, learn, and make new connections. So by the nature of your presence, you have tacitly announced your interest in just this sort of 'arranged' meeting. A dozen encounters with a search engine have yielded many dry PDFs on the subject of your interest, and not much more. To meet someone of this level of expertise might traditionally entail getting on an airplane to some distant conference, sitting (and standing) through days of keynotes, lectures and trade booth conversations, and then having, at best, 5 minutes of the SME's time you finally meet to discuss this topic which, to you, is so vital and compelling and, alas, evanescent. Let's take this thought experiment a few steps further. Imagine that the kind of world-engineered vital connection you just experienced so delighted you and your new SME friend that you both told everyone within your personal learning networks about it. Perhaps that amounts to 100 people who are newly infused with curiosity, and immediately join the virtual world. Within a week, 50% of these new participants have had similar experiences and tell their networks (50 * 100 = 5000). These 5000 knowledge-seekers join, and again 50% have made similar connections within a week (2500 * 100 = 250000). This quarter-million seekers join, and, well, you see where this is going. The virtual world, properly engineered, scales smoothly to accommodate this onslaught of avatars. Soon this particular virtual world has become very crowded. Certainly the world can expand its virtual real estate accordingly, but perhaps you and several of your associates find it to have gotten, well, just too popular, much like when you discover a great new restaurant and enjoy it in relative isolation, only to come back the following week after it received a favorable review or two and find yourself waiting in line for hours just to be seated. The virtuality can pick up on your dissatisfaction from your text posts. Now the feedback it is receiving informs it that its current state is suboptimal, but only for a subset of participants. The virtuality spawns a daughterworld with the participants who have become suboptimal feedback generators. New vistas, new meadows, new mountain ranges await the pioneers of this freshly minted virtuality (with surroundings tailored to their individual and collective preferences). The daughterworld is a new self-optimizing virtuality, distinct from its parent, yet has inherited parameters and algorithms optimized for its pioneer participants. The daughterworld, even more adept and fine-tuned to the minds of its participants, soon garners new members and grows accordingly.

__Localized control__ For a virtual world to be truly self-organizing, its control structure must be distributed, not centralized. Environmental determinants, world characteristics (realistic? Earth-like? Surreal? Highly ordered? Highly chaotic? replete with learning objects? scarcity of learning objects? rural? urban? suburban? Densely populated with objects? sparsely populated with objects? etc etc) are determined at the local level, and may or may not propagate up through localities, regions, domains, to the global. This can be roughly mapped to the constraints of physical (or virtual) servers across which a massive virtuality like Second Life is mapped. However in a system like Second Life, world consistency is desirable, as is centralized control (it is a corporation, after all). Our self-organizing virtuality will consist of cells whose boundaries are highly scalable and elastic. The organization of the world into cells is itself determined by optimization factors and subject to the evolutionary feedback mechanisms of everything else in the world. If self-organization works best at the level of a virtual city block, this will be our cell. If it works best at the level of a diameter of 3 body lengths around any given avatar, that will be the organizational unit of the world. The world itself, governed by the feedback of its inhabitants, will decide at what level it granularizes its control structure.