The Secret Sauce: IOEN’s Agent-Based Architecture
What is an agent? What is a software agent?
Agents do work on behalf of others: a bot is an agent. They can be modelled in object-oriented programming, but the main difference between an agent and an object is autonomy. An agent is preprogrammed with its own little set of rules, and goes forth and does its thing. In the real world, a Dyson vacuum cleaner is an object; a Roomba is an agent.
So what?
Ok, so why are you telling me this? Why does the IOEN project believe this is important?
Nature is an agent-based architecture
In a previous article, we looked at how Nature has developed and evolved autonomous cells that can cooperate to create systems, some that are incredibly complex. A mammal like a dog has trillions of cells, combining based on each cell’s DNA to build eyes, muscles, the lymphatic system. Cellular communication such as metabolic signalling is mind boggling, with hundreds of hormones and enzymes interacting to perform functions from a micro (molecular) to macro (fetching and being a good boi) level.
These systems are running autonomously, without conscious decisions, based on their own set of rules. Ants and bees are completely autonomous, but build complex societies through the emergent behaviour of all the individuals performing their tasks. This allows massive scaling with high resiliency, two requirements of the new IoT world.
IOEN is an agent-based architecture
A key differentiator for IOEN is its use of Holochain, an agent-based peer-to-peer distributed platform. Unlike blockchains which are data-centric and logically centralised with one chain, Holochain agents each control their own local chain and can choose to share with others on what is called a DHT (distributed hash table). This has profound implications for the future of privacy, and by focussing on its own data, can be very lightweight without the burden of an ever growing shared blockchain.
This allows IOEN to be biomimetic, i.e. mimic how Nature creates systems.
Where do we go from here?
Although agent architectures have been around for 4.3 billion years, we are just now rediscovering them as applied to the virtual world. From Alan Turing in 1950 to Conway’s Game of Life in 1971, to cellular automata as described by John Wolfram in 2002, genetic programming has had a long gestation. It is now a key aspect of machine learning for artificial intelligence.
The IOEN project believes swarm intelligence is the only true approach to meet the world’s needs as billions of devices come online and connect. IOEN’s vision is that many cooperating devices can counteract the ravages of climate change through clean, free energy.
We’d like you to join us on our mission. Please visit https://ioen.tech and stay tuned on how you can participate to create a grass roots, bottom up community.
Act Local, Think Global
IOEN is the next generation of digital energy management and optimisation technology. IOEN tech enables an interconnected system of virtual microgrids that facilitate transactions within and between local energy ecosystems: from the appliance level to energy generation, storage, and consumption.
We are the backbone of the new tokenised energy ecosystem, building out the global clean energy ecosystem wherever you are, device by device.
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