Related link: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s551438.htm
Jack Pettigrew's research on
>alternating hemisphere activation
suggested a design pattern to me: any readers know
if it is known by another name?
His website also has a great set of links to
>visual illusions: the Bonneh's Illusion is a lot of fun in particular!
Pettigrew starts with Ramachandran's theory: According to Ramachandran, our beliefs about ourselves and the world develop in the left side of our brain. The function of the right hemisphere is to detect anomalies, forcing the left to revise the established belief structure. . So the right side is inspiration, the left side is perspiration; the right side is the nagging doubt and the thought that suddenly hits you, the left side wants to follow the recipe.
Then Pettigrew adds a time-sharing system ("oscillator") which flips mental activity from one hemisphere to the other a few times a second. Whether this involves just concentrating on the information out from the active hemisphere or actually stimulating activity in the hemisphere I don't know. The oscillator has a fixed clock period with a variable duty cycle: it adjusts the relative amount of time spent dealing with one or the other according according to some rules. I guess this oscillator is the thing that makes you lost for words when startled: your right side is getting more activation that the left.
To apply this software design, we make two parallel systems reading the data and making perceptions/memories/conclusions. One side (the left or predator) tries to ignore outlier data: it is the "me as predator" side, with the eye firmly on the prey. The other side (the right or prey) is interested precisely in the outlier data: it is the "me as prey" side, trying to detect any predator.
The software equivalent of the oscillator would be a layer which determines how much relative timeslice to give to each of the two processes; neither is entirely starved but a process with a short timeslice will take longer to think through its thoughts or, presumably, timeout on complex thoughts.
One nice property of this "predator and prey" pattern, may be that it addresses the customary problem with neural nets: training usually involves kinds of averaging, which doesn't handle outlier information.
You don't have to be involved in writing programs for very long before you realize that dealing with exceptions, signals, errors, unexpected data, environment changes, profiling, debugging, security, robustness, resource allocation, and so on, can render otherwise elegant code baroque: indeed, aspect-oriented has arisen to address some of these issues, pretty much at a textual level. But perhaps applying this pattern at the process or thread level might give more elegant results.
One example of this pattern in use may be a web services system where incoming requests are dynamically sent either dirctly to the service or to a validating proxy which is less efficient. If the proxies start detecting errors, then the dynamic router starts to send more requests through the proxies. The service is acting as a "predator"; the proxy is acting as a "prey"; the dynamic router is acting as the "oscillator".
Another example of this pattern may be automatic garbage collectors, such as in Java. The user's process are the "predator"; the major and minor collectors are the "prey"; the memory manager/scheduler that decides when to run the collectors (and which priority to run them at) is the "oscillator".
Prof. Pettigrew uses a more sophisticated version of this model to theorize about bipolar disorders. The research into treating depresssion by squirting cold water into the left ear is marvelous, to say the least!
Googling for "left right brain" rewards us with a cornucopia of guff and babble. But it seems we can to some extent allot creativity to the right hemisphere (overly active right hemisphere is associated with disorganized thinking, such as schizophrenia, and too little activity could be autism) . And organized thinking (and, at worst, the inappropriate but organized thinking of depression or obsession) to the left hemisphere.
Is left right?
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Illness vs Enlightenment
I received a mail yesterday from a friend that describes a conversation in India in which a Doctor presents the classic symptoms of attention deficit disorder to a group of Indian adults and asks how such a person would be treated in their culture. The answer: they would be honored. In a culture that believes in reincarnation, the jumping from task to task is a sign of a soul cleaning up the last threads of unresolved karma. A person who concentrates exclusively on one topic all the time is a soul in the very early stages of karmic remediation and likely to be facing many more incarnations. A person oscillating at high frequency between left and right brain would look like that.
That aside, a service that uses a recognition pattern and a network of services for remediation is somewhat similar to an immune system network demonstrating a classifier pattern (See Holland, Farmer, etc.) or as you say, a neural net approach. My guess is that if one exposes a service that is deliberately allowed to become infected, this can be used to find viral patterns or other software illnesses with the intention of then mirroring the pattern in a schema or schematron image that can then be replicated as a form of immunization. See Niels Jerne and papers by J. Doyne Farmer.