Standard Lemma guide
Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.
Sound
Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.
noun
The property, of an object, of knowing what and where it is, and being able to report that to every nearby object.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: neologism, uncountable
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
History
The concept was invented by Karl Schroeder in his novel Ventus (2000) and has been adopted by some members of the artificial intelligence community to describe the self-organizing properties of fine-grained distributed networks. The novel states that the word was deliberately chosen as an allusion to "silent Thalia", the muse of Nature. Entities are considered to exhibit thalience if they succeed in developing their own categories for understanding the world.
