thalience
English edit
Etymology edit
The concept was invented by Karl Schroeder in his novel Ventus (2000) and has been adopted by some members of the artificial intelligence community to describe the self-organizing properties of fine-grained distributed networks. The novel states that the word was deliberately chosen as an allusion to "silent Thalia", the muse of Nature. Entities are considered to exhibit thalience if they succeed in developing their own categories for understanding the world.
Pronunciation edit
Noun edit
thalience (uncountable)
- (neologism) The property, of an object, of knowing what and where it is, and being able to report that to every nearby object.
References edit
- Thalience and the Semantic Web, January 16, 2003
- Stephen Cass, The Crush of Information, Discover magazine, Vol. 29, No. 8 (August 2008), p. 47
- Karl Schroeder, Thalience: The successor to Science, 2008 January 23