> > Therefore, with respect to this property, you cannot (in general) reason > about or treat groups of two actors as though they were a single actor.
This is incorrect, well, it's based on a false premise.. this part is incorrect/invalid? (an appropriate word escapes me): But two actors can easily (by passing messages in circles) send out an > infinite number of messages to other actors upon receiving a single message. I see it as the equivalent of saying: "I can write an infinite loop, therefore, I cannot reason about functions" As you note, actors are not unique in their non-termination. But that > misses the point. The issue was our ability to reason about actors > compositionally, not whether termination is a good property. The above statement, in my mind, sort of misunderstands reasoning about actors. What does it mean for an actor to "terminate". The _only_ way you will know, is if the actor sends you a message that it's done. Any reasoning about actors and their compositionality must be done in terms of messages sent and received. Reasoning in other ways does not make sense in the actor model (as far as I understand). This is how I model it in my head: It's sort of the analog of asking "what happened before the Big Bang." Well, there was no time before the Big Bang, so asking about "before" doesn't make sense. In a similar way, reasoning about actor systems with anything except messages, doesn't make sense. To use another physics analogy, there is no privileged frame of reference in actors, you only get messages. It's actually a really well abstracted system that requires no other abstractions. Actors and actor configurations (groupings of actors) become indistinguishable, because they are logically equivalent for reasoning purposes. The only way to interact with either is to send it a message and to receive a message. Whether it's millions of actors or just one doesn't matter, because *you can't tell the difference* (remember, there's no privileged frame of reference). To instrument an actor configuration, you need to put actors "in front of it". But to the user of such instrumented configuration, they won't be able to tell the difference. And so on and so forth, "It's Actors All The Way Down." ... I think we found common ground/understanding on other things. On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 6:40 PM, David Barbour <dmbarb...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Tristan Slominski < > tristan.slomin...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> stability is not necessarily the goal. Perhaps I'm more in the biomimetic >> camp than I think. >> > > Just keep in mind that the real world has quintillions of bugs. In > software, humans are probably still under a trillion. :) > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > > On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 6:40 PM, David Barbour <dmbarb...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Tristan Slominski < > tristan.slomin...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> stability is not necessarily the goal. Perhaps I'm more in the biomimetic >> camp than I think. >> > > Just keep in mind that the real world has quintillions of bugs. In > software, humans are probably still under a trillion. :) > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > >
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
