4 ms·

It wasn't clear to me at first if choiceless computation is present due to a mere design decision or if it is necessary to the Escher paradigm. I suppose it pla

by tmcb 12y ago

It wasn't clear to me at first if choiceless computation is present due to a mere design decision or if it is necessary to the Escher paradigm. I suppose it plays a role on the load distribution over different instances of a same computation unit --- as "computation unit", I mean reflexes, gates and circuits. Am I right? It reminded me of languages like Lucid[1] and Quil[2], which treat non-von Neumann models of computation; Escher, though, seems to focus at the IPC level. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_%28programming_language%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_%28programming_language%... [2] https://sites.google.com/site/quilweb/ https://sites.google.com/site/quilweb/

deleted 12y ago
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petar 12y ago
Choiceless Computation is how the "outside" world looks to an Escher program. This is easier to understand, if you study go circuit.org because it is a concrete product not just a semantic. There: A program starts and sees nothingness. Then a host emerges out of nowhere. (A human provisioning engineer must have turned it on in the data center.) Then the program can do something with it (like start a database) or it can wait (indefinitely) for another emergence of a host (before it sets up an elastic DB, say). The point is that objects emerge in your "sight" and they are nameless. The namelessness is the choicelessness. And this might seem like a small difference, but it is huge. Chomsky tells Linguists: Try to imagine the world from the new-born baby's point of view; and trust me that the baby is born knowing nothing. The only difference is that the baby sees a "blooming buzzing confusion" (i.e. many hosts are online already). But the connection is that everything is nameless (at first). The baby sees many visual pixels. They have no meaning (i.e. no linguistic names). Later the baby sorts out the confusion and assigns names to all phenomena in its sight. Same for circuit programs. They see a nameless army of live hosts. They are all equally good, hence nameless. Then the program start purposing them differently (some are dbs, some are https, etc.). This is the same as the baby assigning names to pixels in its sight until it wakes up one day at age 5, thinking it understands the world. Ha :)
- edmack 12y ago
  Interesting. I'd love to hear some problems that this is good at solving to put it in context

by tmcb 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

petar 12y ago

Choiceless Computation is how the "outside" world looks to an Escher program. This is easier to understand, if you study go circuit.org because it is a concrete product not just a semantic. There: A program starts and sees nothingness. Then a host emerges out of nowhere. (A human provisioning engineer must have turned it on in the data center.) Then the program can do something with it (like start a database) or it can wait (indefinitely) for another emergence of a host (before it sets up an elastic DB, say). The point is that objects emerge in your "sight" and they are nameless. The namelessness is the choicelessness. And this might seem like a small difference, but it is huge. Chomsky tells Linguists: Try to imagine the world from the new-born baby's point of view; and trust me that the baby is born knowing nothing. The only difference is that the baby sees a "blooming buzzing confusion" (i.e. many hosts are online already). But the connection is that everything is nameless (at first). The baby sees many visual pixels. They have no meaning (i.e. no linguistic names). Later the baby sorts out the confusion and assigns names to all phenomena in its sight. Same for circuit programs. They see a nameless army of live hosts. They are all equally good, hence nameless. Then the program start purposing them differently (some are dbs, some are https, etc.). This is the same as the baby assigning names to pixels in its sight until it wakes up one day at age 5, thinking it understands the world. Ha :)

edmack 12y ago
Interesting. I'd love to hear some problems that this is good at solving to put it in context