Re: Event-Oriented Computing

[Nelson Minar]

Hey Glen, nice message.

>It was pointed out on another mailing list I'm on that Larry Yeager
>characterizes the programming effort at Vivarium as "Event-Oriented
>Computing".

What list was that?

>As I understand it, Swarm wasn't intended as JUST a modeling toolkit,
>although that goal is worthy in itself. It was also intended as a
>kind of pond in which you toss things that have the potential to
>learn to exploit their environment.

Swarm has plenty of goals - some grandiose, some simple. The main goal
has always been a simulation toolkit, though, and so the concentration
has been on that.

I've been actively pursuing some of the other ideas in my research
since leaving the Swarm project. I've been working on a paradigm I
call "an ecology of distributed agents" - an environment that supports
lots of agents interacting with each other, exploring their world (the
Internet), etc.

I'm deep into this stuff and haven't written enough of it up yet, but
some of the details are in my master's thesis
  http://nelson.www.media.mit.edu/people/nelson/research/masters-thesis/
as well as my current application of these ideas, Hive
  http://hive.www.media.mit.edu/projects/hive/

>it strikes me that Swarm has the potential to be pre-adapted as an
>Event-Oriented Computer, as I imagine Larry's describing, if and only
>if we can develop the mechanisms for agents to explore the
>computational space in which we place them.

Reflection in your OO language goes a long way towards enabling
exploration. ObjC supports that reasonably well. You also need some
sort of semantic lookup, though, and that's an open problem. We're
using RDF, an XML document type, and developing our own schema ad hoc.

                                                  address@hidden
.       .      .     .    .   .  . . http://www.media.mit.edu/~nelson/


                  ==================================
   Swarm-Modelling is for discussion of Simulation and Modelling techniques
   esp. using Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp. [un]subscribing),
   please send a message to <address@hidden> with "help" in the
   body of the message.
                  ==================================