JamesBurke: I picked this story up while browsing Mark Wallaces fascinating blog on the metaverse, called 3pointD . There are a number of theories and approaches speculating on the arrival of greater intelligent forms. Often called AI, although with many variations, NEW TIES funded by the EU explores collaborative intellgence modelled on humans, done by machines, or agents. Agent-based research has been going on for a long time. I remember working for a failed start-up that was supposed to revolutionize communites back in the late 90s. The concepts were powerful although they never seemed to launch a high-profile product. So it’s no surprise this comes from the research community. Curious to see the findings after the 36 month experiment duration elapses.

“The NEW TIES project is growing an artificial society using computer programming that develops agents–or adaptive, artificial beings–that have independent behaviours. The project is the first of its kind to develop a large-scale and highly complex computer-based society. The project’s results may have larger implications for information technologies design, evolutionary computing systems, artificial intelligence and linguistics.
The project’s goal is to evolve an artificial society capable of exploring and understanding its environment through cooperation and interaction. The agents are sufficiently complex and their environment demanding, which enables them to develop a communication system to learn how to cooperate and to adapt.

Innovations
The development of social learning by passing on knowledge using language within the same generation is a key innovation of the project. Social learning enables the society to rapidly develop an “understanding” of its world collectively. By probing the collective mind we learn how agents perceive their environment and their society. We also assess what skills they have developed to adapt successfully.

Large scale experiments
The project is a significantly scaled-up experiment beyond any existing state-of-the-art social simulation. To study the highly complex beings and their behaviours, we are developing very large populations supported by a distributed computing infrastructure and a shared, p2p platform. The large-scale system ensures that the environment and society is complex enough to allow significant behaviours and interactions to emerge.”

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