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Distributed systems also deadlock in ways that local watchdogs can't account for. You still imply the global watchdog of the brain of the systems designer to na

Distributed systems also deadlock in ways that local watchdogs can't account for. You still imply the global watchdog of the brain of the systems designer to navigate those problems. All of your examples require a human homunculus to steer a system away from deadlocking. The brain doesn't have an architectural homunculus to do that for it, and yet, it does not deadlock in any way resembling the deadlocks we see in computer science. My question is how did the brain do this without a system architect? How can natural selection have a bias that prevents deadlocking in neural compositions?

eesmith 8y ago
While you haven't expressed the source of your intuition, based on your answers, you see the architecture of human-designed systems, which are engineered based on economic considerations, as being predictive of what natural systems are like. This is not, generally speaking, true. Even when built on standard computing architecture, we see that designs influenced by evolutionary design can result in "bizarre, mysterious, and unconventional" designs. I'm quoting from Thompson and Layzell's "Analysis of Unconventional Evolved Electronics" (1999). In that paper, note that the evolve system had a different response to temperature change than the "brittle failure" of normal digital circuits. System crashes like what you describe are "brittle". Evolution, by human design senses, is incredibly wasteful. We are not going to build computers or distributed computing systems that way, hence any intuition based on those design principles are likely not applicable. You asked "How can natural selection have a bias that prevents deadlocking in neural compositions?" The "how" is easy - organisms with hard crashing deadlocks don't reproduce. You want to know what that mechanism is, which is a different question. If you really want to understand this, you'll have to talk to biologists who focus on this sort of topic, not a "hacking news" sites.

eesmith 8y ago

While you haven't expressed the source of your intuition, based on your answers, you see the architecture of human-designed systems, which are engineered based on economic considerations, as being predictive of what natural systems are like. This is not, generally speaking, true. Even when built on standard computing architecture, we see that designs influenced by evolutionary design can result in "bizarre, mysterious, and unconventional" designs. I'm quoting from Thompson and Layzell's "Analysis of Unconventional Evolved Electronics" (1999). In that paper, note that the evolve system had a different response to temperature change than the "brittle failure" of normal digital circuits. System crashes like what you describe are "brittle". Evolution, by human design senses, is incredibly wasteful. We are not going to build computers or distributed computing systems that way, hence any intuition based on those design principles are likely not applicable. You asked "How can natural selection have a bias that prevents deadlocking in neural compositions?" The "how" is easy - organisms with hard crashing deadlocks don't reproduce. You want to know what that mechanism is, which is a different question. If you really want to understand this, you'll have to talk to biologists who focus on this sort of topic, not a "hacking news" sites.