DARPA will host two Proposers’ Day Workshops that will provide critical information on the program vision, milestones, and opportunities associated with the development of interdisciplinary teams to respond to an anticipated Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) about their Physical Intelligence Program (PI).
The PI program aspires to understand intelligence as a physical phenomenon and to make the first demonstration of the principle in electronic and chemical systems.
A central tenet is that intelligence spontaneously evolves as a consequence of thermodynamics in open systems.
The program plan is organized around three interrelated task areas:
(1) creating a theory (a mathematical formalism) and validating it in natural and engineered systems;
(2) building the first human-engineered systems that display physical intelligence in the form of abiotic, self-organizing electronic and chemical systems; and
(3) developing analytical tools to support the design and understanding of physically intelligent systems.
If successful, the program would launch a revolution of understanding across many fields of human endeavor, demonstrate the first intelligence engineered from first principles, create new classes of electronic, computational, and chemical systems, and create tools to engineer intelligent systems that match the problem/environment in which they will exist.
Concepts relevant to these objectives “can be found in numerous disciplines and areas of research including statistical physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, dissipative systems, group theory, collective behavior, complexity theory, consciousness theory, non-linear dynamical systems, complex adaptive systems, systems analysis, multi-scale modeling, control systems, information theory, computation theory, topology, electronics, evolutionary computation, cellular automata, artificial life, origin of life, microbiology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary chemistry, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, brain modeling, organizational behavior, operations research and others.”
Thanks, Katie Drummond, for pointing to this source in DARPA.
Special Notice DARPA-SN-09-35: Physical intelligence (PI);
Proposers’ Day Workshop, DATES: June 9th and June 11th, 2009;
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: May 29, 2009.