SOMIK: System Of Mobile Interactive Knowledge

1 Motivation Over the years of human history, man-made systems reached higher and higher levels of complexity, as we wanted them to perform more and more complicated tasks. The predominant way humans use to build their machines is to construct them as more or less rigid structures of modules, each performing a predeened task, with a minimal number of connections between modules. In fact, this modular structure is considered necessary by the rules of correct system design taught to engineers, computer programmers, and other technical types. Why do we always choose such a rigid structure for our machines? Clearly, the main virtue of a rigid system is that it is easy to comprehend and trou-bleshoot if a problem occurs. Modules can also be reused in diierent machines, given that they perform general enough functions. Rigid systems have their problems though: The number of elements in the system rises proportionally to the complexity of the task. If the task complexity rises exponentially, then so does the number of elements. The probability of a fault rises exponentially as the number of elements rises linearly, because of possibly faulty connections between elements. Based on those problems, one can deduce that designing a complex yet reliable machine becomes a diicult task. Indeed, in current designs reliability is often achieved through complete duplication of functions, which is very costly and raises complexity even further. Because of this complexity crunch, it seems likely to me that rigidly designed systems will sooner or later give way to other designs. To get an insight into what those designs may be, let us look at Nature, which was doing its own design and optimization for millions of years. By looking at biological organisms, we can see several main diierences they have from the man-made systems: