Lock-ins, Canalization, Functional Dependency: Where Does This All Lead to?

Lock-ins, Canalization, Functional Dependency: Where Does This All Lead to?

Alex Riegler Center Leo Apostel, Free University of Brussels
Principia Cybernetica


In this talk I will point out the importance of the three concepts, how they relate to each other and how they contribute to cognitive processes ranging from artificial life to distributed information systems. In particular, I will outline implementation principles for serendipitous web agents that cope with information overload in an expectation-driven way. In contrast to information retrieval agents, the agents' goal is to find out general systematic properties of web links which are hidden from a human web designers and users.