3 ms·
What's interesting is that there's no "destination" for these chemical signals, they're just emitted into the void. There's no sense of sender/receiver, which h
by imode 7y ago
What's interesting is that there's no "destination" for these chemical signals, they're just emitted into the void. There's no sense of sender/receiver, which has some correspondence to the blackboard model[1,2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_system
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_(design_pattern) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_(design_pattern)
- agumonkey 7y agoMaybe not directly but I'm sure these organisms has knowledge of context which influence hormone release. I'd be surprised if it was totally or near totally blind.
- chongli 7y agoYeah, exactly. The synchronous, one-to-one method calls of C++ or Java bare basically no resemblance at all to bacteria chemical signals. The former are essentially functions which dispatch on the first parameter. The blackboard model isn't quite accurate though. Chemical signals have spatial locality, propagation delay, and half-lives. An asynchronous, peer-to-peer mesh network of actors would be a closer approximation to the bacterial signal model.
- imode 7y agoSomething like a "place-based" tuple space would be more accurate, yeah.
- GuiA 7y agoSee also: membrane computing/P systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_system
- edejong 7y agoThe original ideas behind Smalltalk did allow a void, as in modern day Kafka would be a void or a multi-cast IP address would be a void. There is no clear receiver, there can be multiple receivers or there can be none. Communication is ephemeral. Also, even with the single dispatch system of Smalltalk, we can easily model something similar to the Blackboard system.