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Date:Tue, 24 Feb 2004 20:10:25 +0000 (UTC) 
Subject:RE: References on Poplog Concurrency? 
From:bfulg 
Volume-ID: 

(Aaron -- Moved to my "public" e-mail address since
this is going to the UseNet gateway)

[[ ... snip useful links for further reading ... ]]

> > Could someone please point me towards any
 references on this topic?
> 
> You may be able to get more help if you say
 precisely what you want to
> do as there are many kinds of concurrent systems
 with very different
> requirements.

I'm interested in the fault-tolerant aspects of
systems composed of concurrent entities communicating
with loosly-coupled message passing.  See for example
Joe Armstrong Erlang-based thesis
(http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/) on this issue.

Erlang is not an idea platform for me because it lacks
the constraint and logic programming aspects of Poplog
and Mozart, so these (complicated) systems would have
to be implemented in Erlang.
 
> > in the fashion of Mozart/Oz or Erlang)?
> 
> I don't know much about these systems but I suspect
 that they 
> tend to be
> aimed at supporting so called 'multi-agent' research
 and development,
> involvign large numbers of relatively simple
 homogeneous 
> processes using
> relatively simple forms of interaction distributed
 over multiple
> machines, with lots of built-in support for use of
 internet mechanisms
> (web addresses, email, etc.)

Yes.  Erlang models the world as a set of lightweight
processes (almost objects), consisting of a
lightweight thread running in an "endless"
tail-recursion.  These processes communicate through
message passing.

> SimAgent is primarily directed at people wishing to
 explore
> architectures where individual agents each of which
 is very 
> complex with
> multiple components of different sorts interacting
 in many different
> ways including some of them observing the internal
 behaviour 
> of others,
> and including a lot of support for self-observation
 and
> self-modification.
> 
> If what you want to do fits Mozart well it will
 probably give 
> you better
> support than Poplog/SimAgent. If your needs are not
 well 
> defined and you
> want to explore a variety of different sorts of
 inhomogeneous
> architectures you may find the flexibility of
 simagent 
> preferable, along
> with the debugging advantages of an implementation
 based on an AI
> language with incremental compiler.

Yes -- my needs are not specifically targeted at
Erlang or Mozart.  Mozart and Poplog seem closer to
what I want than Erlang, but Poplog is so large that
it was hard to assess what features were *lacking*
(rather than what features do exist).

Thanks for the pointers,

-Brent