MLK Day on Monday, then Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday.

Image by BL1961 via Flickr

Martin Luther King’s Day on Monday, then Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday; could you have arranged it any better?

I am looking forward to Tuesday’s inauguration poem, which is authored (and will be recited) by the highly accomplished poet Elizabeth Alexander.

Yes We Can! The affirmation of the collective.

Image via Wikipedia

In bio-inspired fields of Artificial Intelligence (such as neural networks, particle swarms and evolutionary computing), the methodology of performance improvement is based on using or networking a large collection of simple processing elements to achieve an emergent collective intelligence. The whole surpasses the sum of its parts.

Barack Obama, having been a community organizer, understands the power of this principle of bottom-up organic synthesis. With such arrangements, whether of people, neurons or cellular automata, the power is in the network.

Artificial Intelligence researchers know that such networks can have complicated dynamics with difficult to predict results. Nonetheless these fascinating networks being tried and tested mechanisms of nature doubtlessly have the capacity to deliver when they must.

Yes We Can!