On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 10:23 PM, John Zabroski <[email protected]>wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote: > >> It would be great if everyone on this list would think deeply about how to >> have an "eternal" system, and only be amplified by it. >> >> For example, take a look at Alex Warth's "Worlds" work (and paper) and see >> how that might be used to deal with larger problems of consistency and >> version control in a live system. >> >> I also believe that we should advance things so that there are no hidden >> dependencies, and that dependencies are nailed semantically. >> > > Alan/Alex, > > Worlds does not address how to debug a live system other than random > state-space exploration. > > Have you made progress I am not aware of? > > As I've said before, computer scientists must be much better at studying > living systems if they want to build systems that can function at scales > that exceed the capacity for humans to configure it. How exactly does > "Worlds" truly deal with larger problems of consistency and version > control? The same question applies to David Reed's TeaTime, which is really > just Worlds with an illusion of infinite memory. I, too, could edit a > PhotoShop image forever and scroll through the history of every edit I ever > made using the History view, but I would need a lot of memory to do it. In > practice, PhotoShop requires the user to do things like compacting layers > and other memory organization techniques. > > To really make something like TeaTime or Worlds useful, you need bounds on > how the history relation of a program affects the input/output relation. > Even with bounds, you can still have "glitches" like the Brock/Ackerman > Anomaly. But the nice thing about bounds is there is a lot of mathematical > ways you can describe bounds, such as linear temporal logic or linear types > or just any linearity guarantee period. > > That said, it is okay to have hidden dependencies, as long as somebody is > allowed to check those dependencies at any point in time they please. A bad > hidden dependency would be something like a NAT firewall causing a protocol > to stop working. But an even more pernicious hidden dependency is in all > software: BUGS! > > Dealing with bugs has led Carl Hewitt to propose we should just live with > them, and reason about live systems using inconsistency tolerant logic. He > prefers his own logic, DirectLogic. > > Cheers, > Z-Bo > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > > I wonder how these worlds would merge split streams of worlds. Or will worlds only allow branching without combining. Could I pull in another world and start combining them ? Or should they behave as website history, where I use the backbutton to trace may steps? Karl
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