Many children not only like to build, they also like to knock things down – to hear the complicated noises and watch so many things move at once. Let’s imagine a sibling agent to Builder called Wrecker , whose specialty is knocking things down: Suppose Wrecker gets aroused, but there’s nothing in sight to smash. Then Wrecker will have to get some help – by putting Builder to work, for example.

Are people machines? “Everyone knows that machines can behave only in lifeless, mechanical ways.” This objection seems reasonable. A person ought to feel offended at being likened to any trivial machine. But it seems to me that the word “machine” is getting to be out of date. We ought to recognize that we’re still in an early era of machines, with virtually no idea of what they may become.

GUIs and APIs are both human interfaces. They both frame perspectives on data/operation service offerings so that human beings can navigate and consume them. The human being in the case of APIs is the application programmer, a subset of users. GUIs are applications, so it is natural to expect an API’s capabilities to be a superset of a corresponding GUI’s — application programmers program the GUI using the API.

In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best. It’s mainly when systems start to fail that we engage the special agencies involved with what we call “consciousness.” Accordingly, we’re more aware of simple processes that don’t work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly. This phenomenon helps to explain the poor performance of many so-called expert systems in the 1980s.

What keeps a mouse contained in a box? It is the way a box prevents motion in all directions. Each board bars escape in a certain direction. The left side keeps the mouse from going left, the right from going right, the top keeps it from leaping out, and so on. The secret of a box is simply in how the boards are arranged to prevent motion in all directions. That’s what containing means.

What makes a tower more than separate blocks, or a wall more than a set of many bricks? Every block/brick is held in place by its neighbors and gravity. Why is a chain more than its various links? To explain why chain-links cannot come apart, we can demonstrate how each would get in its neighbors’ way. In graphical diagrams of such physical situations, the edges drawn between nodes are – implicitly or explicitly – labeled, qualified relations.

In my latest post for the Starschema blog, I discuss the end of dashboards, and what comes next: Read the full post here.

Some like to focus on the new. They like to invent theories. Some are adamant about reducing to what has come before. This has worked remarkably well for the core of physics. These inclinations are not incompatible given some kind of “leveling”, with discipline about connections. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. Much of apparent “novelty” may be reducible to the structured annotation and (re-)configuration of core mechanism.

An agent like Builder is not merely a collection of parts like Find , Get , Put , and all the rest. Builder would not work at all unless those agents were linked to one another by a suitable network of interconnections: Could you predict what Builder does from knowing just that left-hand list above? Of course not. First, we must know how each separate part works.

It is the nature of FAIR that can make digital resources kin – interoperable in fugues of machine action. The differences in the schema, serialization, or domain-specificity of the digital datoms out of whose intricate relationships any given resource is built are altogether trivial. Subscribe to get short notes like this on Machine-Centric Science delivered to your email.