Robust-first Computing Wiki

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======== From atoms to Pacman ========

Cooperation and interaction are the basis of all living things. The ability of two beings to communicate with one another is what allows them to evolve and form more complex structures. This is, as I see it, the basis of life. 

{{ :andres:pacman:pacman.png? | from atoms to pacman}}

==== Challenges: ====
  * **Limited Communication: ** The architecture we are working on is designed on a way that communication outside the event window is not trivial to accomplish. In addition to this, the randomness of the event picking mechanism, makes it even more challenging to accurately simulate a full fledged communication within individuals. In order to approach this challenge, it is important to preserve all the guarantees that the mfm architecture offers, such as Robustness and Scalability.
  * **No "global" knowledge: ** Given that the communication usually occurs within a given event window, knowledge doesn't usually reach out of such event window, which might be a desired effect, but when there is certain objective that is being pursued, having all the entities have knowledge of some common piece becomes a priority. 
  * **No way to assemble complex structures: ** Given the two prior limitations, there is absolutely, positively no way of assembling a complex structure that //behaves// like an autonomous entity yet is made of smaller pieces. This, however, can be overcome when there is a communication channel between all the entities, and global knowledge is being shared among them.

==== Proposed Solutions: ====

**Communication protocol:**
{{ :andres:pacman:sitemap.png | communication protocol}}

For the first challenge, I have devised a very rudimentary (it will evolve over the time) protocol that allows the communication of different entities; in this protocol, the normal //only-behave// model is replaced by a //recv-behave-send// model, that takes messages sent from the other entities, it may or may not use this messages to perform its processing, and then sends messages telling other entities what happened. In order to implement this communication tier on the mfm architecture, there should be a consideration whether the implementation will be intrusive or non-intrusive, because this will change things abruptly in the future.

**Quorum Polling:**
{{ :andres:pacman:quorum.png | Quorum polling}}

This is only a very rough draft on how to overcome the global information barrier. It is based on a voting system, where each one of the elements announces it's vote on certain matter, and then the decision is made based on the votes proposed. It is important to notice that there has to be a minimum amount of elements involved in the voting procedure in order to make it valid, which is where the Quorum denomination comes from.