The Metaphor of Distributed Intelligence

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Abstract
Let me propose an updated metaphor that is more appropriate to the times and more muscular in its power to explain: the metaphor of distributed intelligence. In the beginning of the mainframe computer era, computers relied almost totally on huge central processing units surrounded by large fields of memory. The design was much like that of a mass-production factory. Then along came a new architecture called massive parallelism. This broke up the processing power into lots of tiny processors that were distributed throughout the field of memory. When a problem was presented, all of the processors would begin working simultaneously, each performing its small part of the task and sending its portion of the answer to be collated with the rest of the work that was going on. It turns out that this “distributed intelligence” approach is more effective for solving most problems.

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