Digital Ecosystems: Optimisation by a distributed intelligence

Can intelligence optimise Digital Ecosystems? How could a distributed intelligence interact with the ecosystem dynamics? Can the software components that are part of genetic selection be intelligent in themselves, as in an adaptive technology? We consider the effect of a distributed intelligence mechanism on the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of our Digital Ecosystem, which is the digital counterpart of a biological ecosystem for evolving software services in a distributed network. We investigate Neural Networks (NNs) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) for the learning based pattern recognition functionality of our distributed intelligence. Simulation results imply that the Digital Ecosystem performs better with the application of a distributed intelligence, marginally more effectively when powered by SVM than NNs. These results suggest that a distributed intelligence can contribute to optimising the operation of our Digital Ecosystem.