Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!amdahl!kp
From: kp@uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: "Sensor Evolution"
Summary: Blackboard Soup
Keywords: blackboards, ribosomes, productions, spools
Message-ID: <0b9J02yW95G801@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com>
Date: 23 Mar 90 02:25:25 GMT
References: <12533@venera.UUCP>
Reply-To: kp@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting)
Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 34

In article <12533@venera.UUCP> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
>In article <792@berlioz.nsc.com> andrew@dtg.nsc.com (Lord Snooty @ The Giant
>Poisoned Electric Head       ) writes:
>>
>> . . . because there exists this "soup" ("pool"
>>for softies) where everything is accessible, if you wait long enough.
>>
>>My point is this: it is a very beautiful architecture, but no-one builds it;
>>not even Neural Nets are *that* parallel.
>
>Part of the problem is that we still really do not have to resources to build
>such an architecture.  Neural nets still cannot capture the magnitude of most
>nervous systems which we study.  If you want to talk about ribosome soup, you
>are dealing with a system of even larger scope . . . perhaps so large as to be
>beyond the ability of our imagination to design it.

Blackboard-style algorithms (eg HEARSAY II) use the "wait for a substrate"
approach.  Newell's "production" systems use it too.  My fave example,
though, is JES or HASP - the spooling systems in IBM mainframes.  These
spoolers have "initiators", which select jobs from an input queue for
execution.

An initiator sits in an address space, scanning the queue for a job
with matching identifiers, until it finds one.  Then the initiator
pounces on the string of JCL cards, linking the data sets identified on
"DD" cards, and loading the programs identified on "EXEC" cards, until
it reaches the end of the jobstream.  There is even a facility wich is
roughly the opposite of excising an "intron" - the JCL processor can
insert new JCL from a "procedure library", whereafter it will merrily
continue processing the expanded jobstream.

I won't even get started on CICS automatic transaction initiation...

Ken Presting  ("System programmers do it with more imagination")