The Dangers of Distributed Intelligence [Perspective]

There is an increasing interest in, and implementation of, the Internet of Things. As the number and types of interconnections increase, it is important to be aware of the dangers of distributing the required intelligence among the participants, and the consequences of not foreseeing the dangers. In order to address these dangers, it is necessary to understand the notion of a “partial pattern match.” As two examples of this kind of thinking, consider computer programmers (who look at similar pieces of code and by tweaking them, make a single subroutine out of them), and punsters (who make partial pattern matches among words.