First Implementation of the World-Wide-Mind

Abstract

The “World-Wide-Mind” (WWM) is introduced in [1]. For a short introduction see [2]. Under this scheme, it is proposed that autonomous agents researchers in AI and ALife construct their agent minds and agent worlds as servers on the Internet. Users will be able to run remote 3rd party Minds in other remote 3rd party Worlds. And users will be able to construct complex “Societies of Mind” out of many different remote Mind servers, and run this Society as a single Mind in some World. The motivation is: (a) to re-use other people’s Worlds, (b) to re-use other people’s Minds as components in larger, multiple-mind cognitive systems, and (c) to divide up the work in AI, so people can specialise on different parts.

This poster details the first working implementation of this idea. The key principle behind this implementation is to make it as trivially easy as possible for any author of a World or Mind to put it online without having to learn any network programming or any particular language. All technology involving a particular programming language (e.g. Java) or requiring the learning of particular programming skills (e.g. sockets) has therefore been rejected. A solution is proposed where the Mind or World author need only know how to repeatedly read plain text from and write plain text to a local file.