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Comment by abss | Hacker News Reader

Examples: 1. executable chreographies implemented as messages belonging to the same identity (swarm of related messages) 2. workflows (BPM kinf of stuff when you look at them as long living processes). In this case the process dies and get revieved in time. All these instaces belonving to a single concept. 3. Even smart contracts fall under this swarm approach because the execution happens in many places but somehow it is still a single concept.

In an way, obkects are just degenrated swarms...

The whole idea is quite simple but maybe a bit too abstract... We proposed even an simple primitive called "swarm" that can be used to program. I had a old project called swarmesb (not active anymore) but this perspective got me to a lot more insights in another open source research project called privatesky... https://privatesky.xyz/overview/swarms-explained is an attempt i made to explain this way of seeing swarms.

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It seems like object to swarm is like a data item is to a data array in array languages.

However there’s a problem. It’s easy enough to send a swarm a message. Not so easy to understand back the cacophony it produces.

Many actions in the world are specific instances in terms of facts, despite being part of a larger category.

How would a swarm PayPal work like? John sends 10 to Jane. That’s one to one, not swarm to swarm.

If you look how things are organized in nature, there’s always a swarm synchronizer, bringing the many to one.

It can be avoided in simple probabilistic systems, but it emerges back with complexity. I don’t talk to a swarm of cells for ex. I address the single entity defined by your central nervous system.

I see the swarm in a different way: it is a set of objects and effects happening within time but still identifiable from a single source. The synchornisation that you are talking about could be required but we can see the swarm as exploring an distributed system in time as well in space and using the external world as some sort of synchronisation support. The entities of the swarm are like messages with an simple associated behaviour. Synchronisation is complex and it is part of world exploited by swarms for a while but not really an behaviour of the swarm... Look at my examples: in choregraphies the synchronisation becomes the propagation of some effects in a distributed system, in the business process case the swarm happens in time but at a specific time you have few swarm members alive and just persisting the instance is some sort of synchronisation. In the case of smart contracts, the swarm is just at a logical level as part of consensus... May be is a bit strange to play this game but I find it usefull to imagine or even progam complex events as swarms of little entities with short lives and with fairly simple behaviours that can compose in complex behaviour of the swarm itself.

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