    7

    Society as a Neural Net

    A social group is also a network.  If a hunter corners a mother

    otter, she'll cry out for her mate.  If the hunter kills her, her babies will

    starve.  She's only one nexus in a web of relationships.

    Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence

    Laboratory at MIT, thinks of the brain as a society--a society of

    sub-assemblies cooperating to learn about the world.6  The image can

    easily be reversed.  A society is a brain.  It is a learning device.  And it

    works according to the principles that drive a neural net.

    Like switches wired together in a connectionist web, a

    community of bees is constantly communicating to form a mass brain

    that can solve problems no single bee could ever tackle. In one

    experiment, scientists began by placing a dish of sugar water at the exit

    of a hive.  Over the course of time, they moved the water, first a few

    inches from the hive, then a few feet, then a few feet more--always

    increasing the distance by a precise increment.  The researchers

    expected that the bees would follow the dish and cluster around it.  To

    their surprise, after a few days, the insects were doing far more than

    merely tagging along after the moving sugar water.  The bees would

    fly from the hive and cluster on a spot where the dish had NOT been

    placed--the site where the insects anticipated the dish would be put

    next.  And their calculations were right on target.7

    Working as a mass brain,8 the bees had accomplished something

    humans are forced to endure in college entrance exams.  They had

    solved the problem of a mathematical series.

    The brain of a bee is an insubstantial thing--a slender thread of

    neural fiber scarcely capable of anything we would call intelligence.

    But the strength of a neural net does not lie in the limited abilities of

    any one node in the web.  The strength of the connectionist

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