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Comment by imode | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting is that there's no "destination" for these chemical signals, they're just emitted into the void. There's no sense of sender/receiver, which has some correspondence to the blackboard model[1,2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_system 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_(design_pattern)

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Yeah, exactly. The synchronous, one-to-one method calls of C++ or Java bare basically no resemblance at all to bacteria chemical signals. The former are essentially functions which dispatch on the first parameter.

The blackboard model isn't quite accurate though. Chemical signals have spatial locality, propagation delay, and half-lives. An asynchronous, peer-to-peer mesh network of actors would be a closer approximation to the bacterial signal model.

Something like a "place-based" tuple space would be more accurate, yeah.