Hi Alan, Your metaphor brought up a connection that I have been thinking about for a while, but I unfortunately don't have enough breadth of knowledge to know if the connection is worthwhile or not, so I am throwing it out there to this list to see what people think.
If figuring out module communication can be likened to communicating with aliens, could we not look at how we go about communicating with "alien" cultures right now? Maybe trying to use "real-world" metaphors in this case is foolish, but it seemed to work out pretty well when you used some of your thoughts on biology to inform OOP. So can we look to the real world and ask how linguists go about communicating with unknown cultures or remote tribes of people? Has this process occurred frequently enough that there is some sort of protocol or process that is followed by which concepts from one language are mapped onto those contained in the indigenous language until communication can occur? Could we use this process as a source of metaphors to think about how to create a protocol for "discovering" how two different software modules can map their own concepts onto the other? Anyway, that was something that had been running in the background of my mind for a while, since I saw you talk about the importance of figuring out ways to mechanize the process modules figuring out how to communicate with each other. Thanks, Jeff On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 9:06 AM, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Hi David > > This is an interesting slant on a 50+ year old paramount problem (and one > that is even more important today). > > Licklider called it the "communicating with aliens problem". He said 50 > years ago this month that "if we succeed in constructing the 'intergalactic > network' then our main problem will be learning how to 'communicate with > aliens'. He meant not just humans to humans but software to software and > humans to software. > > (We gave him his intergalactic network but did not solve the communicating > with aliens problem.) > > I think a key to finding better solutions is to -- as he did -- really > push the scale beyond our imaginations -- "intergalactic" -- and then ask > "how can we *still* establish workable communications of overlapping > meanings?". > > Another way to look at this is to ask: "What kinds of prep *can* you do > *beforehand* to facilitate communications with alien modules?" > > Cheers, > > Alan >
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