Challenge Propagation: towards a mathematical theory of distributed intelligence and the Global Brain

This working paper wishes to introduce a new idea, challenge propagation, which synthesizes my older work on spreading activation in collective intelligence , and my more recent ontology of action . The basic idea is to combine the notion of “challenge”, which is defined in the action ontology as a phenomenon that elicits action from an agent, with the notion of “propagation” or “spreading”, which comes from models of neural networks, memetics , and complex systems, and which denotes the process by which some phenomenon is iteratively transmitted from a point in a space (or a node in a network) to the neighboring points (or nodes). The intention of this work is to provide a conceptual and mathematical foundation for a new theory of the Global Brain, viewed as the distributed intelligence emerging from all people and machines as connected by the Internet. However, the notion of challenge propagation seems simple and general enough to also provide a foundation for a theory of distributed intelligence in general. This includes human intelligence—which as neural

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