Emergent Phenomena

This eight minute video is extremely exciting. I'd come across the ideas behind using semantic links within photos to create a whole much more powerful than the sum of its parts, but this short movie from a recent conference is well worth a look to see the incredible potential from something as simple as tagging. I've written a post a while back on tagging within personal computers because the idea of folders seems completely outdated to me. The post seemed a little dry, so take a look at the movie and realise what power can be gained from this new, but incredibly simple concept.

The link for the video came from Bad Astronomy Blog and you will find more information on this sort of system in Data Mining - one of my favourite tech blogs.

This step seems to be the difference between a random collection of cells to a brain with neurons connected by synapses. The numbers involved with such combinatorics are mindblowing and the emergent phenomena will be fascinating to see.