Author(s)

Rao Mikkilineni

Kawa Objects, Los Altos, USA.

Cognition is the ability to process information, apply knowledge, and change the circumstance. Cognition is associated with intent and its accomplishment through various processes that monitor and control a system and its environment. Cognition is associated with a sense of “self” (the observer) and the systems with which it interacts (the environment or the “observed”). Cognition extensively uses time and history in executing and regulating tasks that constitute a cognitive process. Whether cognition is computation in the strict sense of adhering to Turing-Church thesis or needs additional constructs is a very relevant question for addressing the design of self-managing (autonomous) distributed computing systems. In this paper we argue that cognition requires more than mere book-keeping provided by the Turing machines and certain aspects of cognition such as self-identity, self-description, self-monitoring and self-management can be implemented using parallel extensions to current serial von-Neumann stored program control (SPC) Turing machine implementations. We argue that the new DIME (Distributed Intelligent Computing Element) computing model, recently introduced as the building block of the DIME network architecture, is an analogue of Turing’s O-machine and extends it to implement a recursive managed distributed computing network, which can be viewed as an interconnected group of such specialized Oracle machines, referred to as a DIME network. The DIME network architecture provides the architectural resiliency, which is often associated with cellular organisms, through auto-failover; auto-scaling; live-migration; and end-to-end transaction security assurance in a distributed system. We argue that the self-identity and self-management processes of a DIME network inject the elements of cognition into Turing machine based computing as is demonstrated by two prototypes eliminating the complexity introduced by hypervisors, virtual machines and other layers of ad-hoc management software in today’s distributed computing environments.

Cognition; Cognitive Process; Computationalism; Turing Machine; Turing O-Machine; DIME; DIME Network Architecture

R. Mikkilineni, "Going beyond Computation and Its Limits: Injecting Cognition into Computing," Applied Mathematics, Vol. 3 No. 11A, 2012, pp. 1826-1835. doi: 10.4236/am.2012.331248.