[exprla-devel] RE: [XPL] - WorldOS - framework for distributed computing
Status: Pre-Alpha
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From: reid_spencer <ras...@re...> - 2002-01-31 09:08:42
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--- In xpl-dev@y..., "Richard Anthony Hein" <935551@i...> wrote: For security we can use encryption defined by XSLT-like transformations to voice or visual recognition that matches to verification transformations supplied by someone who has your transformation key, and can then supply the correct data to parameters and what not. A firewall, like a blood brain barrier, does the verification, and so do the individual cells (computers), gates (method calls), and other components. It could work. Richard Anthony Hein -----Original Message----- From: Richard Anthony Hein [mailto:935551@i...] Sent: June 16, 2000 6:44 PM To: xpl@e... Subject: RE: [XPL] - WorldOS - framework for distributed computing -----Original Message----- From: me@m... [mailto:me@m...]On Behalf Of Jonathan Burns Sent: June 16, 2000 8:07 AM To: xpl@e... Subject: Re: [XPL] - WorldOS - framework for distributed computing Richard Anthony Hein wrote: Everyone,There is something called WorldOS that is a framework for distributed computing that could be useful to XPL. If you read some of my other posts you will know why I like the idea of using such a framework. It includes "a simple TCP server, an XML oriented application server, and tools for peer routing similar to Freenet or Gnutella. The application server uses a new protocol distinguished by pluggable transports, XML message content, and asynchronous messaging."It's opensource, so that's good, and it's in the early stages of development, but does function. So we could get our input in there once we have an architecture for XPL, that would make WorldOS even better for our purposes. Anyways, take a look at http://www.worldos.org/worldos/index.php3 to get the details.Richard A. Hein So happens, I've just stumbled onto WorldOS myself. This was just after I'd gained a clue what Gnutella is. (Gnutella is a search engine for files. Load a query for some file by name. The query fans out among all the Gnutella users your system can find, and all that THEY can find, recursively. With luck, download access to the file(s) you're after will eventually be passed back to you, and show up in a window. Meanwhile, your system is picking up its end of other users' searches.) And Napster, which does the same kind of thing for MP3s music files. And FreeNet, which gets you onto a web of, shall we say process or user identities, allowing exchange of data on an IP-independent basis, more or less untraceable by the usual TCP/IP methods. Furthermore, this is after I have been reading and hearing for some time about: PunkNet, an architecture like FreeNet. Linda, a network OS and language in which "tuples" circulate through data stores on widely distributed machines, being gathered and processed by some kind of content search. Seti@Home. The Morris Internet Worm, and others of its kind. To cap it off... Check out Kurt Cagle's slideshow on VBXML. It's couched in general principles, but if I have it right, Kurt's vision is of free-floating, call-'em-by-name XML documents, which encapsulate LOCATION and PROTOCOL, so as to present the casual user with a web of data bound to data, leading wherever you want to go via search-engine interfacing. No more searching for a site, going there, accessing the FTP or whatever, and finally accessing the data you want by name. This is looking like a paradigm. Now I completely agree, Richard, that we should investigate WorldOS - and maybe make common cause with it. See, WorldOS will evidently conduct any XML documents. So if we maintain a layer within XPL development which is Pure XML - no processing primitives, no COM hooks, no binding to external mechanisms - then WorldOS will function as a transparent distributed mechanism for that layer. Technically, it's a potent tool for us. But sheesh. Is anybody as unnerved as I am, about the implications of "data gas" webs like this, especially when people like us are going round, endowing them with full processing capability? Call me conservative. I spend a lot of time fuming about how free markets have diffused the consequences of actions beyond the point where anyone can be imputed responsibility for them. Collectively, we've committed ourselves to a world society, while disabling the corrective checks and balances that a society needs, against the concentration of power. The Web is the same, in fast-forward. It's this fast, not because of communication speed, but because there's so little power involved in publishing and scanning information, that it's relatively harmless. But already, the Web is facing a massive contradiction: intellectual propery funds it, but its consequence is the devaluation of intellectual property. What happens when information is completely dissociated from authorship? When programs are completely dissociated from authorship? When worms can be released in perfect anonymity? When you can't tell the good worms, like Seti@Home, from the bad worms, or from worms like Napster which sidestep around intellectual propery? When there is no such thing as a trusted source? Well, that's the New Economy Political Agenda, anyway. On a more technical plane, what bemuses me is, how do we find things in a data gas? Answer: We refer to them by content rather than location - and we use personal or site caches to nail down copies or shortcut addresses. At a guess, if or when we go and implement an XPL data gas, we will be using XML tech to implement the Universal Resource Access mechanism we need. XPath on steroids, man. <spooky> I've got this vision, of an ocean of little XML thingies - parse trees on the loose. They leaf out in typed nodes. Spotlights sweep across the ocean - people and their sundry bots, paying attention, and thereby supplying CPU power to the thingies. Thingy awakens. It finds a phone. Good morning switchboard, I'm looking for stuff with these types and content and timestamp and authentication (that's my leaves). Oh, you got some - good. Instantly, thingy is linked up with others of its kind, making a temporary Big Thingy. And so on recursively. At some point, all the leaves are filled in, down to primitive elements, and there's some XPL present, which activates its XSLTs, and the whole Big Thingy goes to work - on borrowed CPU power, from a multitude of sources. Presently, Big Thingy has bred a bunch of children, and put them on the phone to the people and bots who originally requested whatever services. They get linked up with GUI thingies, which deliver the service to the end user. End user satisfied, spotlights blink off, thingies go back to sleep. But some middlesize thingies are bigger now, or more current. They contain a little bit of information on the late transaction, cached away, ready for the next time. The whole thing has more than a passing resemblance to brain function. Furthermore, it has a close structural resemblance to John Koza's Genetic Programming paradigm. Here again we have parse trees on the loose - Lisp expressions. Here again we have the free-floating population. From the population, a quantity of elements are selected, and activated. They are programs - feed them to a Lisp interpreter (spotlight) and they run. This can be done in parallel. It can be done like Seti@Home. It's a data gas. The outputs of the programs are collected, and scored. Depending on its score, each activated element is given breeding instructions - drop out, or replicate yourself, or split apart, or split and recombine with some other element, on a type-compatible basis. A new spotlight comes on. In its warm glow, the elements follow their instructions. The population is modified. Collectively, it now contains more elements which are fitter, more likely to score high. And it contains many elements which were parts of fit individuals, and statistically likely to have contributed to their success. It's an evolving data gas. </spooky> Kltpzyxm! Jonathan His wit never failed him, and he laughed himself to death over a book of the dying words of famous men. - Thomas M. Disch, Camp Concentration. [Richard Anthony Hein] Jonathan, this whole concept is like the brain, and like genetics, and it seems likely it's the language we need for artificial intelligence, and a learning, intelligent web. The brain's neurons hold data of what we have input into our brain. Structures of proteins, various types unlock memories and mix together in octoganal structures in our dreams, sorting through information, trying to link things together that make sense with other memories, like a super- defragmentation process for pure data. [Richard Anthony Hein] When a neuron fires, whether it fires or not is an all-or-nothing process; either it reaches a threshold of electrical charge and fires, or it says at rest. Only the frequency of the firing varies ... this is like a component that only responsed when called by the correct parameters supplied. In the neuron the parameters are the neurotransmitters - keys which unlock protein gateways that are only opened by those keys (although occasionally they are opened by drugs, and so on, which would be like a virus that calls XPL to process data). Depending on the combination of gates opened, which is dependent on the keys used, which activate internal processes in the neuron (XPL program), the electrical charge in the neuron increases or decreases (processes in XPL take input and activate internal data - which can be information calls to another XPL program - and decide what to return, that activates calls to other internal or external data sources and XPL programs, and finally the return value comes back - send information or not ...), and finally the neuron fires. It could also apply to Jonathans cpu activation under the spotlight concept - when the right combination of XML is looked at by XPL programs that fits the XPL's filter it 'fires' the XPL which sends a signal to another cpu that searches through other XPL program filters ... millions via the neural network peer-to-peer WorldOS - parameters of any self- describing media type using Groves of XML, down to each tree and branch and leaf and outputs a ... 'fruit' ... the combination of the media remaining and presents it to the user. This process did all the formating using XSLT and other transformations, perhaps using XUL - we shouldn't overlook it, but until it becomes a standard we shouldn't ... perhaps XPL will have to do it. Also, XLink needs to work as Thomas Poe wrote in another follow up. Each client - which is a cpu needs to be able to create multi- directional links throughout it's data gas (maybe Jonathan, it could be likened unto "utility fog" taken from nanotechnology science fiction, and be called "data fog". Now we need to build the structure and movement - the XPL - and like the neuron, the data, commands, and structure are one. Each command is data, and data is a structure and a structure is a program. The cpu operates on them using parameterized calls with data that is a structure and a command - which was put together by other cpus, calls and operations. If I have repeated myself, it's because I want everyone to see it. When holographic techniques, like the research on tiny cubes the size of a grain of sugar that can store 10,000 web pages, that are accessed by different angles of light (gates) instantly sending a sigal in a yet to be optical computer will allow any kind of media ... to be accessed and sorted by matching the optical pattern (the letter's shapes themselves BECOME the keys to the gates - the commands, the structure, and the data! Does anyone see the deepness this goes to?? Think about vision, thought! If you take XML to describe the physical world, XSLT goes over it ... the outward appearance is different, but it's the same thing ... like apples come in different shapes, syles, and kinds, but they are all apples, but what it is the same because it has the same underlying being ... the XML! Think hearing! Sound described as XML matches media of sound translated by XPL processes calling XSLT to output as sound, or display as sheet music, or combine scales, modes, frequencies and make music! When a person speaks to a computer, their is a transformation made into XML data - each person has their own 'HXSLT' language to transform it! Wow! Someday when we have nanotechnology that simply senses structure variations we can take those and describe them too in XML. The robot will sense structural changes and respond using tiny cpus and match them to learned patterns stored in it's data store within it's neural net. This is artificial intelligence! Taste and smell would follow. This is beyond the scope of XPL. I think we should talk to artificial intelligence and neural network scientists, and maybe DARPA. In the meantime, XPL still has to be designed based on what we have come to, if the vision will become real. Do we want it to happen? Should it happen? Richard Anthony Hein ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: xpl-unsubscribe@o... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: xpl-unsubscribe@o... --- End forwarded message --- |