Biological Foundations?

[Detlef Morgenstern]

Dear Sergio,

You wrote:
>I have several questions and comments to do but
>let me first pose this one: does anybody can talk
>about the biological foundations of CasC? I have some
>ideas but I'm very interested in hearing others.

Some time ago I asked myself this question:
What if my boss came and said: "Design a brain!" ?

At first I would have a look around for existing implementations. There is
this one made by Evolution, Inc. The binaries are shareware, you can have
the "Hardware Maintenance" manual but they can't find "Operating System
Installation and Administration" at the moment, and they say the source code
is lost.

-- I do not know the machine code (instruction set).
-- I do not have an assembler.
-- I do not have a dis-assembler.
-- I can see Terabits of binaries.
-- I can't ask people from the developer team.
Would it be wise to try reverse engineering under such circumstances? I
think, no.

What then? I would prefer re-designing it from the scratch. And this is what
seems to make the competitor's design perform first class and could be
adopted:

-- Parallelism
-- A myriad of trivial but autonomous processing units
-- Communication lines between neighbouring units
-- Parameters (settings, "program") for a unit stored near the unit
-- Ability to process tabular knowledge: IF (causes) THEN (effects)
-- Ability to process functional knowledge: IF (call parameters) THEN
(activity)
-- Ability to recursively compose/decompose structure using these unified
elements
-- Ability to transform tabular knowledge to (more compact) functional
knowledge ("abstraction")

There is one more feature, but this is hard to implement:
-- Make connections between the processing units switchable.
If I could find an alternative with fixed connections, the whole affair
would be technologically much easier.

I would try to make the processing unit as primitive as possible (you see
some related considerations in my other postings). Which is the absolute
minimum? Evolution's brain seems to have still too much complexity in its
processing units (neurons), they seem to have been in a hurry when designing
this. And now they must switch connections.

Maybe, if I can make it simpler, I need not switch the lines...

So I would ask my boss for a decent budget, define a schedule and go on.

Regards,

Detlef Morgenstern