The World-Wide-Mind project

The World-Wide-Mind project proposes that the construction of advanced artificial minds may be too difficult for any single laboratory to complete. At the moment, no easy system exists whereby a working mind can be made from the components of two or more laboratories. This system aims to change that, and accelerate the growth of Artificial Intelligence, once the requirement that a single laboratory understand the entire system is removed.

The "World-Wide-Mind" dream was finally realised with the launch of the site Ancient Brain in 2018.

Ancient Brain

The "World-Wide-Mind" dream was finally realised with the launch of the site Ancient Brain on 12 Feb 2018.

Go there. Get an account. And start coding!

One of Worlds on the site.
Click to run Mind: Complex Mind in World: Complex World at Ancient Brain.
Mouse drag and zoom camera.

The World-Wide-Mind project
Completed PhD 2014 - Oisín Mac Fhearaí. Massively multi-author hybrid artificial intelligence. Online at doras.dcu.ie.
Selected Pac-Man Worlds. From the DCU 3rd year class of 2014.
ChessWorld (2013) by Oisín Mac Fhearaí
An Experimental System for Real-time Interaction Between Humans and Hybrid AI Agents, Pendlebury, John; Humphrys, Mark and Walshe, Ray, 6th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Systems (IS'12), Sofia, Bulgaria, September 6-8, 2012.


Massively Multi-Author Hybrid Artificial Intelligence, by John Pendlebury, Mark Humphrys and Ray Walshe, ERCIM News, Issue 89, April 2012, pp.40-41.
Selected Worlds. From the DCU 3rd year class of 2012.

"MinerWorld" by Dmitri Lerko
John Pendlebury starts PhD, Oct 2011.
A Framework for Scaling Up Distributed Minds, Oisín Mac Fhearaí, Mark Humphrys and Ray Walshe, 3rd International Conference on Software, Services & Semantic Technologies (S3T 2011), Bourgas, Bulgaria, September 1-3, 2011. Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing, 2011, Volume 101, pp.211-212.
Assembling Hybrid Minds, Oisin Mac Fhearai, Mark Humphrys and Ray Walshe, Proceedings of the 22nd Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS-2011), University of Ulster, 31st August to 2nd September 2011. Proceedings pp. 76-85.
A High-Speed Architecture For Building Hybrid Minds, Oisín Mac Fhearaí, Mark Humphrys and Ray Walshe, Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2011), Rome, Italy, January 28-30, 2011. Volume 1 - Artificial Intelligence, pp.659-663, SciTePress, 2011.
The World-Wide Mind Project: Enabling the Integration of User Worlds, Brian J. Monks, M.Sc. in IT, DCU, 2010.
Oisín Mac Fhearaí starts PhD, Oct 2007. The entire architecture of the system has been changed, and massively sped up.
O'Leary, Ciarán; Generating Temporal Arguments for Action Selection in Modular Reinforcement Learning Agents. In proceedings of 17th Irish conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS06), Belfast, Northern Ireland, 11th-13th September 2006.
Collaborative Online Development of Modular Intelligent Agents, by Ciarán O'Leary, Mark Humphrys and Ray Walshe, ERCIM News 64, January 2006.
A novel application of Web Services in Computer Science education, O'Leary, Ciarán; Humphrys, Mark; and Walshe, Ray (2005), in The International Conference on "Computer as a tool" (EUROCON 2005), Belgrade, Serbia & Montenegro, November, 2005.
Reuse and arbitration in diverse Societies of Mind, O'Leary, Ciarán (2005), Proc. 16th Irish conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS-05), Coleraine, Northern Ireland, September 2005.
AI Expert Newsletter, December 2004
Constructing Complex Brains: Building minds using sub-minds from biotechnology authors, Walshe, Ray; Humphrys, Mark and O'Leary, Ciarán (2004), 1st IFIP Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations (AIAI-04), Toulouse, France, August 22-27, 2004 (see also here and here).
Constructing an animat mind using 505 sub-minds from 234 different authors, O'Leary, Ciarán; Humphrys, Mark and Walshe, Ray (2004), Proc. 8th Int. Conf. on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB-04), July 2004, Los Angeles, CA. This is the result of our first experiment with a large number of Mind authors.
Building a hybrid Society of Mind using components from ten different authors, O'Leary, Ciarán and Humphrys, Mark (2003), Proc. 7th European Conf. on Artificial Life (ECAL-03), Dortmund, Germany, September 14-17, 2003.
Technology for automated assessment: The World-Wide-Mind, Ciarán O'Leary, 4th Irish Educational Technology Users Conf. (EdTech-03), Waterford, Ireland, 22 and 23 May, 2003.
"The next best thing to a brain?" (or here), article on the WWM by Dick Ahlstrom, The Irish Times, 20th Mar 2003.
Talk by Ciarán O'Leary, "Building a World-Wide-Mind: Using the Internet to build an Artificial Intelligence" to the Oxford University Artifical Intelligence Society, 3 Mar 2003.

4 minute video interview at SAB, Aug 2002,
to Complexity Digest (also here).
"Download and multiply" (formerly here), New Scientist, 10 August 2002 issue. Also titled as "Many minds solve AI's woes".
Review of SAB-02 by Stefaan Van Ryssen in Leonardo Reviews, MIT Press.
Humphrys, Mark and O'Leary, Ciarán (2002), Constructing complex minds through multiple authors, Proc. 7th Int. Conf. on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB-02), August 2002, Edinburgh, Scotland. This explains how various agent and animat architectures could be put online.
O'Leary, Ciarán and Humphrys, Mark (2002), Lowering the entry level: Lessons from the Web and the Semantic Web for the World-Wide-Mind, poster at 1st Int. Semantic Web Conf. (ISWC-02), June 2002, Sardinia, Italy. This discusses how the WWM aims to emulate the Web with its low entry level.
O'Connor, Dave and Humphrys, Mark (2002), The Implementation of a Distributed Hierarchical Mind on the Internet using the World-Wide-Mind, Dublin City University, School of Computing, Technical Report no. CA-0302.
The Origin of the Speeches: language evolution through collaborative reinforcement learning, Walshe, Ray, (2001), Proceedings of 3rd International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2001), A. de Antonio, R. Aylett and D. Ballin (Eds.), LNCS 2190, Springer.
Humphrys, Mark (2001), Distributing a Mind on the Internet: The World-Wide-Mind, in Advances in Artificial Life: Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL-01), Prague, Czech Republic, Sept 2001.
Walshe, Ray and Humphrys, Mark (2001), First Implementation of the World-Wide-Mind, poster in Advances in Artificial Life: Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL-01), Prague, Czech Republic, Sept 2001.
Humphrys, Mark (2001), The World-Wide-Mind: Draft Proposal, Dublin City University, School of Computing, Technical Report no. CA-0301, Feb 2001.