biomimicry

By

NAME

biomimicry

NOTES

The acme-sac tarballs I've been working on producing are intended to be compact, contain all the source, and be runnable once it is unpacked at its destination.

The complete copy of it's own source means it can grow and adapt to its own environment. It can also create and host the tarballs of itself, thereby replicating and dispersing itself.

This structure makes me think of spores. The running acme-sac instance on my laptop is creating spores which I'm casting out from my laptop across the internet hoping that new copies will unpack in fertile soil and form new living cells that themselves can grow and reproduce.

This analogy is not new. And there are books on biomimicry for subjects other than computing. The question I have is, if the analogy is followed further and more explicitly what will be the results?

Or put another way, should large software systems intentionally use biomimicry as a architectural solution?

Alan Kay has used the cell analogy explicitly when describing object oriented programming, with its use of encapsulation to protect the inside of the object from interference, and message passing between objects as the means of building functionality.

Alan Kay also drew inspiration from the way the internet was being built, whose growth and operation also mimics biology, where each host is a kind of cell communicating with other hosts only through message passing. This approach has scaled very well. Is it because it mimics nature?

Another way to look at this is that if we don't mimic nature we are doomed to fail. Failure in the sense I mean here is that inferno as a software species will not survive longer than the lifetime of the author.

In my analogy of acme-sac and the cell, the cell is not an object, or a single thread, but a single VM with its own file tree.

So far there is no purpose assigned to any individual cell. There is no purpose assigned to the software for the end-user. Each cell is more of a general agent, or universal object, that finds many local purposes, hopefully useful to the end-user so that it survives selection pressure and gets replicated. The only overall purpose for the systems architecture is to survive.

The goals for the tarball are to be runnable on many hosts. To contain source so it can adapt. Be a general agent so it can replicate, rebuild, and host the spores to disperse to new hosts. Maybe these goals don't even need to be stated but are always implicit in the system.

For example, inferno-os was already distributed over the internet, and selection pressure has already caused inferno-os to evolve, such that acme-sac is a local variation.

And there are others, a little known race lives in Australia, I believe.

But maybe by being aware of the context it might help survival.

Selection pressure might make the code smaller, more compact. Might bootstrap the system to higher levels of complexity.

To survive it needs host environments with disk space, cpu and networking, and power, and a symbiotic relationship with people.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

lab 110 - inferno archive edition

By
I've been occupied recently with archiving my digital media. I've been copying home videos on DV tapes to hard-disk, ripping audio CD's to WAV files, gathering photo collections, and trying to copy documents from Iomega disks, floppies, and my dusty old Acorn RiscPC. The plan is to have a copy of this data to give to each of my children. My Dad recently scanned and sent me all his photographs of me and my siblings growing up; he also included pictures of himself and my Mother when they met in Africa. With technology today each generation can build a digital library of family history to hand on to the next generation. In the past a family album may have been passed on to only one person. The accumulation of digital data still presents problems. It requires discipline to store files that are open and not locked into devices or proprietary formats. With digital preservation in mind I've tried to use file formats recommended for long term archiving. WAV files for audio, D
Read more

lab 107 - midiplay

By
NAME lab 107 - midiplay NOTES Midiplay plays back MIDI files. It uses the synthesizer I described in lab 62 and the MIDI module from lab 73. The command takes only one argument, the path to the midi file. I've included one in the lab to demonstrate. Bind the audio device before using it. % bind -a '#A' /dev % midiplay invent15.mid The synthesizer has 16 note polyphony. It uses three oscillators, one at the pitch, one at half pitch, one at double pitch. There is also a filter, two delays and a vibrato. The sample rate is 8000hz and there is one mono channel (MIDI channel events are ignored). It performs well enough to work on my laptop without JIT turned on. All the synthesizer parameters can only be tweaked from inside the code at the moment. FILES lab - 107
Read more

The Cartesian Theater of AI

By
Image
The Cartesian Theater was an intuition pump proposed by philosopher Daniel Dennett to describe a false theory of consciousness. Inside the mind is a stage watched by a humunculus that observes what passes on the stage, hears the sounds, and controls the rest of the mind by responding to the action of what the smaller version of the self sees. Of course, what makes the smaller self conscious? It is an infinite regression. Our understanding of mind is that there is no such theater. There is no one place in the mind that is the locality of consciousness. I want to offer another thought experiment based on the concept of a Cartesian Theater. Imagine a theater containing a screen with a camera pointing at it, and a speaker with a microphone directed toward the speaker. The camera is pointing at the screen. The mic is pointing at the speaker. However, instead of there being an infinite loop due to a direct connection between the camera and screen, insert an AI in the loop. The imag
Read more