Robust-first computing: Demon Horde Sort (full version)

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DonHopkins · 2017-05 · Strong recommendation

A Movable Feast Machine [1] is a "Robust First" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. The video "Distributed City Generation" [2] demonstrates how you can program a set of Movable Feast Machine rules that build a self-healing city that fills all available space with urban sprawl, and even repairs itself after disasters! The paper "Local Routing in a new Indefinitely Scalable Architecture" [2] by Trent Small explains how those rules work, how the city streets adaptively learn how to route the cars to nearby buildings they desire to find, and illustrated the advantages of "Robust First" computing: Abstract: Local routing is a problem which most of us face on a daily basis as we move around the cities we live in. This study proposes several routing methods based on road signs in a procedurally generated city which does not assume knowledge of global city structure and shows its overall efficiency in a variety of dense city environments. We show that techniques such as Intersection-Canalization allow for this method to be feasible for routing information arbitrarily on an architecture with limited resources. This talk "Robust-first computing: Demon Horde Sort" [4] by Dave Ackley describes an inherently robust sorting machine, like "sorting gas", implemented with the open source Movable Feast Machine simulator, available on github [5]. A Movable Feast Machine is similar in many ways to traditional cellular automata, except for a few

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DonHopkins · 2017-05 · Strong recommendation

I recently submitted a link about "Robust First Computing". It didn't get any response, but I'll repeat the link and description here, since it's certainly esoteric, but has some extremely important properties. Robust-First Computing: Distributed City Generation [LINK] A Movable Feast Machine [1] is a "Robust First" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. The video "Distributed City Generation" [2] demonstrates how you can program a set of Movable Feast Machine rules that build a self-healing city that fills all available space with urban sprawl, and even repairs itself after disasters! The paper "Local Routing in a new Indefinitely Scalable Architecture" [2] by Trent Small explains how those rules work, how the city streets adaptively learn how to route the cars to nearby buildings they desire to find, and illustrated the advantages of "Robust First" computing: Abstract: Local routing is a problem which most of us face on a daily basis as we move around the cities we live in. This study proposes several routing methods based on road signs in a procedurally generated city which does not assume knowledge of global city structure and shows its overall efficiency in a variety of dense city environments. We show that techniques such as Intersection-Canalization allow for this method to be feasible for routing information arbitrarily on an architecture with limited resources. This talk "Robust-first computing: Demon Horde Sort" [4] by

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camel-cdr · 2023-01 · Recommendation

As I understood it: The T2 tiles are "normal" microcomputers, that run a special software stack implementing the cellular automata. The tiles communicate over the connections, and essentially just act like a bigger automata grid. But the interesting part is that there is no global synchronization, and this architecture could be scaled indefinitely wide, by just adding more tiles. The impressive/hard part is creating the asynchronous automata, where each cell can only see a fixed amount of neighbors, and creating something from that. Edit: I think this video explained the general idea quite well: [VIDEO]

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