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by thelazydogsback 2235 days ago
This looks like cellular-automata and other reactive a-life -- while I suppose you could stretch the def'n of multi-agent systems to cover these, it's certainly not the first thing that you'll find in the literature. Cool though.

Smalltalk had some groundbreaking ideas -- but "an app. is an image of the whole, monkey-patched class hierarchy shipped with the entire system" certainly wasn't it's greatest contribution.

1 comments

That “certainly” is a little funny to hear in the age of docker images.
Nice one! One could also cite Electron apps. But I don't think people are entirely happy w/containers or Electron apps for similar reasons of their monolithic nature, image size, versioning, patching, etc. At least w/Docker you have a DockerFile that specifies the composition semantics -- in ST you tend to just save an image in a magic state that was the result of user interactions.