Oct 25 2007
Vinge Wins Hugo (Again)
The 2007 Hugo Award Winners were announced awhile ago and I saw that Vinge had won another Hugo for his excellent novel Rainbows End. I love Vinge and read everything he puts out, as soon as it comes out. He is one of the few I will pick up in hardback, which I did with Rainbows End.
One thought after rereading. We are currently in the middle of our Fall 2007 AI Course. Vinge is a Computer Scientist by training, and it shows in his work. The ideas just leap off of every page of this novel. I especially love his concepts of Analyst Pools. These are really a bit of a fleshed out version of a borganism (a term invented by Stross, I believe). I can almost see how a system like this might be created in today’s world of Social Networking Systems and Wisdom of Crowds organization. To bring it back to our AI class, imagine a big A* or min-max search specification being conducted in real-time. But instead of machine generated and evaluated heuristic functions, imagine analysts instead providing human-level-intelligent type heuristic estimation of states, possibly mitigated by a Prediction Market to allow many competing heuristic estimates of states to be combined. I could imagine, if you could build the software support system to manage 10s or 100s of thousands of analysts all working collectively on such a machine/human guided search, you would have something very like what Vinge envisions in Rainbows End. I’ll just say that I know of research initiatives at NSF and elsewhere that are envisioning and working towards the possibilities of such real-time social borganism as this.