Once a project gets going it usually winds up with a few more goals than those
that got it started -- partly because the individual researchers bring their
own
perspectives to the mix.
But the original goals of STEPS were pretty simple and longstanding. They came
from thinking that the size of many large systems in terms of amount of code
written seemed very far out of balance -- by many orders of magnitude -- with
intuitions about their actual "mathematical content". This led to a "science of
the artificial" approach of taking the phenomena of already produced artifacts
in the general area of personal computing, and seeing if very compact "runable
maths" could be invented and built to model very similar behaviors.
If this could be done, then some of the approaches in the new models would
represent better ways to design and program to complex behaviors -- which could
be very illuminating about systems designs and representations -- and some of
these would likely be advances in programming in general.
I think of this as "scientific exploration via coevolving mathematics and
engineering".
Cheers,
Alan
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