[Infowarrior] - DARPA seeks Borg powers

[Richard Forno]

DARPA seeking Genesis-style godware capability

By Lewis Page • Get more from this author

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/23/darpa_physical_intelligence/

Posted in Science, 23rd June 2009 11:04 GMT

US military wacky-professor bureau DARPA has outdone itself this time,  
issuing a request for "intelligent" electronic components and  
chemicals which can "self-organise" themselves to form complex items  
such as routers, fuel cells, biofuel factories or medical drugs.  
Indeed, reading between the lines it appears as though the American  
killboffins are seeking nothing less than the creation of artificial  
intelligent lifeforms.

The Pentagon crazytech chiefs' name for this initiative is "Physical  
Intelligence", and full details were released last week. According to  
DARPA, humanity at present has only a dim grasp of what intelligence  
actually is and how it came into existence:

     For the past 50 years, the dominant paradigm for intelligence  
supposes that the brain is the seat of intelligence and is  
functionally equivalent to a computer capable of executing any  
algorithm... the goal of true machine intelligence remains distant...  
our understanding of the evolution of life is rooted primarily in  
observations of the natural world... With some exceptions, current  
approaches to understanding intelligence and evolution are  
disconnected and often lack grounding in fundamental physical  
principles.

The idea behind "physical intelligence" seems to be to achieve a much  
better, hard-science understanding of what intelligence and life  
actually is and how it evolves as a matter of physics. Needless to  
say, this being DARPA, this almost God-like intellectual toolkit is  
then to be put to use.

     Although the idea that life is “a struggle for  
entropy” (Boltzmann) has been supposed for more than a century...  
applications to engineered systems are scarce. The Physical  
Intelligence program aspires to change this situation... The objective  
is to demonstrate the first human-engineered open thermodynamic  
systems that spontaneously evolve non-trivial “intelligent” behavior...

Specifically, bidders for DARPA Physical Intelligence cash will be  
invited to design one of two things: electronic gizmos or "basic units  
that might be described variously as 'gates' or 'cells' or 'neurons'",  
or alternatively "an open chemical environment".

The electronic "units", which may initially exist only in a simulated  
environment "comparable in complexity to simple video games (eg,  
Tetris)" are expected to "self organise" and "evolve" into a complex  
configuration, presumably one demonstrating some non-trivial aspects  
of intelligence. As a starter for ten, the super Tetris-block  
electronic neurocells should be able to spontaneously form into "a  
continuously self-organizing router for internet traffic or similarly  
complex application". One should then be able to "extract the  
algorithm, and map it to a conventional computer" - effectively  
turning that computer into an intelligent lifeform.

As for the vatful of smart-chemicals, they're expected - without human  
intervention - to be able to form themselves into drugs, organic fuel  
cells, solar powered biofuel supercrops or "a similarly complex system".

It won't have escaped alert Reg readers that the Physical Intelligence  
DARPA wonder-ware will be quite capable of becoming intelligent life -  
potentially much more capable life than humanity itself. The AI  
algorithms which evolve from the spontaneously self-organising Tetris  
blocks might far outclass the human noggin: the fuel-celled, solar- 
powered, self-medicating lifeforms which emerged from the smartware  
vats would be immeasurably our superiors physically.

Quite frankly we can't help thinking that some more appropriate name  
might have been in order here, like Project Genesis or LET LIGHT=ON or  
something. It's definitely a return to full-on loopy form on DARPA's  
part, anyway.