adappt.io is now adaptive-emergent (part 2 of 3): what's in a name

In the previous blog post, we reviewed what was adappt.io, from 2015 to 2024. In this article we explain why the brand has been updated to focus on applying natural designs to communication networks.

What's in a Name?

adappt's heritage is in its name: the "Dapp" part comes from the Ethereum term for "decentralised applications". Note the dash in the letter "d" in the adappt logo: besides looking cool, the Đ is known as "eth" in Old English and Icelandic, so a Đapp could be pronounced "EthApp" (or at least that is the folklore.. I had to look that up). 

The ladder was a stylised 'A'. If adappt had ever created its own cryptocurrency, this could have been its symbol.

The "io" extension was fashionable in the late 2010s with  "input/output" associated with technology, even though the country code top level domain was created for specks of islands in the Indian Ocean. In 2024, ".io" is mostly out and ".ai" is the hot trend.

Distributed is not decentralised

With adappt's shift to Holochain from web3 blockchain solutions, the terminology started to lose its meaning. Holochain apps are called "hApps", partly because Holochain is a fully distributed, rather than a decentralised, technology. For the difference between these terms, click on this link to a paper written by Paul Baran for the RAND Institute in 1964!

There is a difference

The mission is not complete

There is some unfinished business from days at RedGrid when one direction we considered was biomimetic, organic, and agent-based: 100% ground up.  As mentioned in the previous post, this video was the light bulb moment:

Matthew Schutte's 2017 presentation

In 2019, Mike challenged RedGrid founder Simon to use this approach to solve the problem of houses in a suburb responding to a transformer failure and preventing a blackout. Mike figured each house would require three rules to make a decision: Simon did it in two!

The biological approach is called "cellular automata", first coded as Conway's Game of Life in 1971.  The game of life can have different starting conditions and behaviours to produce quite complex results. The tool Simon used is called golly, which lets you enter rules and observe the result. Simon's program turned off a clump of pixels representing the failed transformer, and then we watched as each nearby house conserved energy if that household had signed up to a "Save the Grid" initiative. The pixels rippled and passed on the message until eventually the perturbation died out and the houses returned to normal energy usage.

In part one we observed how the simplicity of software creating a useful emergent behaviour caught the imagination of large corporations, including Hong Kong's power company. In our era of cloud computing and Big Tech FAANG, here was a radically different, but strangely familiar, approach.

This topic will be explored in depth in future posts. In part three of this series we look at the birth of adaptive-emergent, biomimicry, and how other natural occurrences such as Mandelbrot sets are part of this landscape!