I’d like to introduce some terms and concepts I’ve used and modified in my fiction, to lay a foundation for my own desiderata for petaflops computers. Most are familiar, but they may be used in unfamiliar ways.
I’ll begin by saying that my principal concern is weather, but I may not mean the same thing using that word that you do.
Theoretical background:
1. The study of evolving systems has become important in sociology, politics, economics, physics, and computing, as well as in biology. The concept of an evolvon (my word) includes any unitary system that takes advantage of growth opportunities through ‘learning’ and adaptation to changing conditions. Compounded evolvons inevitably interact to form an feedback-rich community: an ecosystem, or ecos, plural ecoi. Until now, evolvons have been found only in biological systems.
2. Built into any evolvon is a larger-scale drive for expansion and the ability to survive in changing conditions. These qualities demand a learning and self-organizing system similar to that found in the brains of all complex living things. Evolvons within an ecos, and the ecos itself, acquire form and complexity much the same way a baby acquires language. (And ecoi themselves, considered on a larger scale, become evolvons again, in, say, a global, galactic or universal context.) 3. ‘Learning’ is the process of acquiring information and transforming it into ‘knowledge’, that is, physico-chemical structures that eventually control or guide physical action. Information is generated by the environment and is encoded by the evolvon into knowledge. In all biological systems, knowledge is stored in dynamic physical structure, whether it be cellular machinery or a full-scale brain.
