|
It is pretty confusing but what you got is about right. It's about building a whole new computational stack - hardware, software, and systems - that ditches the traditional requirement of deterministic hardware, and replaces that with a requirement for 'indefinitely scalable' hardware. So it absolutely cannot be Conway's Game of Life - though people often think it is - since GoL assumes deterministic execution (plus other issues). The basic architecture is called the Movable Feast Machine (MFM) and yes, that is a 2D cellular automata engine with a bunch of unusual details (asynchronous, large R/W neighborhood, ..). Looking downward, the T2 tiles are specific prototype hardware that implements the MFM. They could be replaced by some other tile that does the same, like x86 could be replaced with ARM given suitable software mods above. Looking upwards from the MFM, some specific cellular automaton - called a 'physics' - is implemented in a custom language called 'ulam'. The physics in the T-0 video involves some 208 ulam classes: Some deal with the 2D diamond grids, some deal with the 1D linked lists within the diamond grids, and all sorts of infrastructure classes and so on. Then on top of all that, a subset of those classes represent instructions for a 1D 'assembly language' with operations like 'extend an arm one step', 'deposit a processor node', and so forth. The 'Ancestor 1312' organism/structure/pattern demonstrated in the video is encoded in a 1D chain of those instructions that is loaded (step by step, using MFM events) into an empty diamond grid at the beginning. |
I don't completely buy into the notion that this needs to be soup-to-nuts; that the T2 / MFM / Ulam stack is a necessarily the right way forward.
But I think that what I see as the core insight -- that determinism and synchronicity is the deep rot at the core of our understanding of how to build distributed systems -- is true beyond all reasonable doubt. The idea of evolving (literally or figuratively) self-healing systems and components is I think at the core of the future of computer science.
And the dirty secret of all distributed systems of significant scale is that they have already escaped the attempt to confine them -- operational complexity has become a matter of botany, but without any insights or tools to help us deal with the actual complexity, but instead applying layers of attempts to reduce complexity that usually just end up reducing the legibility of the system.