Robust-first Computing Wiki

The paradigm of robust-first computing entails an infinitely scale-able environment in which elemental programs interact with each other to create emergent computational behaviors. The usefulness of such behaviors and the fitness of such elements can hold analogous properties to the system of biological evolution in the natural world. This paper will outline research that seeks to explore the evolution of parochial altruism in biological systems by modeling this behavior in a robust-first computational environment. We seek to determine whether the natural evolution of parochial altruism in the biological world, and the increased fitness that it brings, will find a correlate advantage to the elemental programs of robust-first computation, thereby increasing the overall fitness of those programs. We will create an elemental program that can take on one of four behavior categories: Parochial Altruists, Non-Parochial Altruists, Parochial Non-Altruists, and Non-Parochial Non-Altruists. We will allow these elements to interact with each other, both within an in-group of elements, and other out-group elements, in a manner consistent with their behavior, as well as allow sexual reproduction that produces offspring programs with a genetic mix of the behavior patterns of both parents, subject to mutation, thereby modeling an evolutionary system. We will likewise be scaling a value of resource availability in the system to determine whether the presence or absence of abundant resources has a significant impact on the successful emergence of any one behavior category.