Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

To boldly go: an occam-π mission to engineer emergence

  • Published:
Natural Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Future systems will be too complex to design and implement explicitly. Instead, we will have to learn to engineer complex behaviours indirectly: through the discovery and application of local rules of behaviour, applied to simple process components, from which desired behaviours predictably emerge through dynamic interactions between massive numbers of instances. This paper describes a process-oriented architecture for fine-grained concurrent systems that enables experiments with such indirect engineering. Examples are presented showing the differing complex behaviours that can arise from minor (non-linear) adjustments to low-level parameters, the difficulties in suppressing the emergence of unwanted (bad) behaviour, the unexpected relationships between apparently unrelated physical phenomena (shown up by their separate emergence from the same primordial process swamp) and the ability to explore and engineer completely new physics (such as force fields) by their emergence from low-level process interactions whose mechanisms can only be imagined, but not built, at the current time.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Photographs showing remarkably similar shapes in flocks of starlings can easily be found by searching the Internet. They cannot be included in this paper for copyright reasons, nor referenced because of the volatility of their URLs. However, links to images matching those in Fig. 8 can be found in the supporting materials for this paper (Welch et al. 2011b).

References

  • Adams D (1987) Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Gallery Books. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test

  • Andrews PS, Sampson AT, Bjørndalen JM, Stepney S, Timmis J, Warren DN, Welch PH (2008) Investigating patterns for the process-oriented modelling and simulation of space in complex systems. In: Bullock S, Noble J, Watson R, Bedau MA (eds) Artificial life XI: proceedings of the eleventh international conference on the simulation and synthesis of living systems, pp 17–24. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA URL http://www.cosmos-research.org/docs/alife2008-space.pdf

  • Andrews P, Stepney S, Winfield A (2010) Simulation as an experimental design process. EmergeNET4: engineering emergence URL http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/nature/emergeNET4/andrews.pdf. AF/ST-TR-10-01-PR

  • Baker L (2009) Removing roads and traffic lights speeds urban travel. Scientific American URL http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=removing-roads-and-traffic-lights

  • Ballerini M, Cabibbo N, Candelier R, Cavagna A, Cisbani E, Giardina I, Lecomte V, Orlandi A, Parisi G, Procaccini A, Viale M, Zdravkovic V (2008) Interaction ruling animal collective behavior depends on topological rather than metric distance: evidence from a field study. Proc Natl Acad Sci 105(4):1232–1237. URL http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0711437105

    Google Scholar 

  • Barnes FRM, Welch PH (2001) Mobile data, dynamic allocation and zero aliasing: an occam experiment. In: Chalmers A, Mirmehdi M, Muller H (eds) Communicating process architectures 2001, Concurrent Systems Engineering, vol 59. WoTUG, IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 243–264. ISBN: 1-58603-202-X

  • Barnes FRM, Welch PH (2004) Communicating mobile processes. In: East I, Martin J, Welch P, Duce D, Green M (eds) Communicating process architectures 2004, Concurrent Systems Engineering Series, ISSN 1383-7575, vol 62, WoTUG-27. IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 201–218. ISBN: 1-58603-458-8

  • Barnes FRM, Welch PH, Moores J, Wood DC (2010) The KRoC home page. Programming Languages and Systems Research Group, University of Kent, http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/ofa/kroc/

  • Bently PJ (eds) (1999) Evolutionary design by computers. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco

    Google Scholar 

  • Bjørndalen JM, Sampson AT (2008) Process-oriented collective operations. In Welch PH, Stepney S, Polack FA, Barnes FR, McEwan AA, Stiles GS, Broenink JF, Sampson AT (eds) Communicating process architectures 2008, Concurrent Systems Engineering, vol 66, WoTUG, IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 309–328. URL http://www.cosmos-research.org/docs/cpa2008-poco.pdf

  • Brown NCC (2008) Communicating Haskell processes: composable explicit concurrency using monads. In: Welch PH, Stepney S, Polack FA, Barnes FR, McEwan AA, Stiles GS, Broenink JF, Sampson AT (eds) Communicating process architectures 2008, Concurrent Systems Engineering, vol 66, pp 67–83. WoTUG, IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. URL http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2008/2914

  • Brown NCC (2010a) C++CSP home page. Programming Languages and Systems Research Group, University of Kent, http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/ofa/c++csp/

  • Brown NCC (2010b) Communicating Haskell processes home page. Programming Languages and Systems Research Group, University of Kent, http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/ofa/chp/

  • Brown NCC, Welch PH (2003) An introduction to the Kent C++CSP Library. In: Broenink J, Hilderink G (eds) Communicating process architectures 2003, W o TUG-26, Concurrent Systems Engineering, ISSN 1383-7575. IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 139–156. ISBN: 1-58603-381-6

  • Dahm WJA (2010) Technology horizons: a vision for air force science and technology during 2010–2030, vol I. United States Air Force Chief Scientist (AF/ST). AF/ST-TR-10-01-PR

  • Davison A (2005) Killer game programming in Java. Chapter 22, flocking boids. O’Reilly Media Inc., USA

  • Dorigo M, Stützle T (2004) Ant colony optimization. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Easley D, Kleinberg J (2010) Networks, crowds, and markets: reasoning about a highly connected world. Cambridge University Press. URL http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

  • Edelman B, Ostrovsky M, Schwarz M (2005) Internet advertising and the generalized second price auction: selling billions of dollars worth of keywords. Working paper 11765, National Bureau of Economic Research. URL http://www.nber.org/papers/w11765

  • Hemelrijk CK, Hildenbrandt H (2008) Self-organized shape and frontal density of fish schools. Ethology 114(3):245–254. URL http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1439-0310.2007.01459.x/abstract

    Google Scholar 

  • Hoare CAR (1974) Monitors: an operating system structuring concept. Commun ACM 17(10):549–557

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Hoare CAR (1978) Communicating sequential processes. CACM 21(8):666–677

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Hoare CAR (1985) Communicating sequential processes. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Jones RE, Barnes FRM (2010) MirrorGC: garbage collection for multicore systems. URL http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/gc/mirrorgc/. EPSRC EP/H026975/1

  • Klein M, Moreno GA, Parkes DC, Plakosh D, Seuken S, Wallnau K (2008) Handling interdependent values in an auction mechanism for bandwidth allocation in tactical data networks. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on economics of networked systems, NetEcon ’08. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 73–78. URL http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1403027.1403044

  • Lorek H, Informatik F, White M (1993) Parallel bird flocking simulation. Citeseer: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.48.8430

  • Martin J, Welch P (1996) A design strategy for deadlock-free concurrent systems. Transput Commun 3(4):215–232

    Google Scholar 

  • Milner R (1999) Communicating and mobile systems: the π-calculus. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN-10: 0521658691, ISBN-13: 9780521658690

  • Polack FA, Andrews PS, Sampson AT (2009) The engineering of concurrent simulations of complex systems. In: 2009 IEEE congress on evolutionary computation (CEC 2009). IEEE Press, pp 217–224

  • Reynolds CW (1987) Flocks, herds, and schools: a distributed behavioral model. Comput Graph 21(4):25–34. See also: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

  • Ritson CG, Welch PH (2010) A process-oriented architecture for complex system modelling. Concurr Comput Pract Exp 22:965–980. doi:10.1002/cpe.1433. URL http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2010/3066

  • Ritson CG, Sampson AT, Barnes FRM (2009) Multicore scheduling for lightweight communicating processes. In: Field J, Vasconcelos VT (eds) Coordination models and languages, COORDINATION 2009, Lisboa, Portugal, June 9–12, 2009. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5521. Springer, pp 163–183 URL http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2009/2928

  • Roscoe A (1997) The theory and practice of concurrency. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River

    Google Scholar 

  • Roscoe A (2010) Understanding concurrent systems. Springer, Berlin

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Rosenschein JS, Zlotkin G (1994) Rules of encounter: designing conventions for automated negotiation among computers. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Roughgarden T (2010) Algorithmic game theory. Commun ACM 53(7):78–86. doi:10.1145/1785414.1785439

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sampson AT (2010) Process-oriented patterns for concurrent software engineering. Ph.D. thesis, University of Kent. URL http://offog.org/publications/ats-thesis.pdf

  • Sampson AT, Bjørndalen JM, Andrews PS (2009) Birds on the wall: distributing a process-oriented simulation. In: 2009 IEEE congress on evolutionary computation (CEC 2009). IEEE Press, pp 225–231. URL http://www.cosmos-research.org/docs/cec2009-wall.pdf

  • Sampson AT, Ritson CG, Jadud MC, Barnes FRM, Welch PH (2010a) occam-π home page. Programming Languages and Systems Research Group, University of Kent, http://occam-pi.org/

  • Sampson AT, Welch PH, Bjørndalen JM, Andrews PS (2010b) CoSMoS occoids videos. URL http://www.cosmos-research.org/demos/occoids/

  • Sampson AT, Ritson CG, Barnes FRM, Welch PH (2011) occam-π download and install page. Programming Languages and Systems Research Group, University of Kent, http://projects.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/kroc/trac/wiki/Installation

  • Sauter JA, Matthews R, Van Dyke Parunak H, Brueckner SA (2005) Performance of digital pheromones for swarming vehicle control. In: Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems, AAMAS ’05, ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 903–910. URL http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1082473.1082610

  • Sayama H (2011) Seeking open-ended evolution in swarm chemistry. In: IEEE symposium on artificial life (ALIFE) 2011. IEEE Press, pp 186–193. ISBN: 978-1-61284-062-8

  • Schneider S (1999) Concurrent and real-time systems—the CSP approach. Wiley, UK. ISBN: 0-471-62373-3

  • Schweigler M (2006) A unified model for inter- and intra-processor concurrency. Ph.D. thesis, Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF, United Kingdom. URL http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2006/2429

  • Smith A (1904) An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, 5 edn. Methuen and Co., Ltd., London. First published: 1776

  • Stepney S, Welch PH, Polack F, Timmis J, Barnes FRM, Tyrrell A (2010) CoSMoS home page. URL http://www.cosmos-research.org/cosmos/. EPSRC EP/E053505/1 and EP/E049419/1

  • Stonedahl F, Wilensky U (2010) Finding forms of flocking: evolutionary search in ABM parameter-spaces. In: Proceedings of the MABS workshop at the ninth international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, Lecture Notes of Artificial Intelligence (LNCS/LNAI). Springer

  • Turing AM (1950) Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, New Series 59(236):433–460. URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251299

  • Valiant L (1990) A bridging model for parallel computation. Commun ACM 33(8):103–111

    Google Scholar 

  • Welch PH (2011) An occam-π quick reference guide. Programming Languages and Systems Research Group, University of Kent, http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/research/groups/plas/wiki/OccamPiReference/

  • Welch PH, Barnes FRM (2005a) Communicating mobile processes: introducing occam-π. In: Abdallah A, Jones C, Sanders J (eds) 25 years of CSP, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3525. Springer, Berlin, pp 175–210

  • Welch PH, Barnes FRM (2005b) Mobile barriers for occam-π: semantics, implementation and application. In: Broenink J, Roebbers H, Sunter J, Welch P, Wood D (eds) Communicating process architectures 2005, Concurrent Systems Engineering Series, vol 63, WoTUG-28. IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 289–316. ISBN:1-58603-561-4

  • Welch PH, Barnes FRM (2008) A CSP model for mobile channels. In: Communicating process architectures 2008, Concurrent Systems Engineering Series, vol 66, WoTUG-31. IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 17–33. ISBN:978-1-58603-907-3

  • Welch PH, Brown NCC (2011) The JCSP (CSP for Java) home page. http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/ofa/jcsp/

  • Welch PH, Pedersen JB (2010) Santa claus: formal analysis of a process-oriented solution. ACM Trans Program Lang Syst 32(4):14:1–14:37. URL http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1734206.1734211

    Google Scholar 

  • Welch PH, Brown NCC, Moores J, Chalmers K, Sputh BHC (2007) Integrating and extending JCSP. In: McEwan AA, Schneider S, Ifill W, Welch P (eds) Communicating process architectures 2007, Concurrent Systems Engineering Series, vol 65. IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 349–370. ISBN:978-1-58603-767-3

  • Welch PH, Brown NCC, Moores J, Chalmers K, Sputh BHC (2010) Alting barriers: synchronisation with choice in Java using CSP. Concurr Comput Pract Exp 22:1049–1062

    Google Scholar 

  • Welch PH, Pedersen JB, Barnes FRM, Ritson CG, Brown NC (2011a) Adding Formal Verification to occam-π. In: Communicating process architectures 2011, Concurrent Systems Engineering Series, vol 68, WoTUG-33. IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 379–379. URL http://www.wotug.org/papers/CPA-2011/Welch11/Welch11-slides.pdf. ISBN: 978-1-60750-773-4

  • Welch PH, Sampson AT, Wood DC (2011b) “To Boldly Go: an occam-π mission to engineer emergence”—supplementary materials. Programming Languages and Systems Research Group, University of Kent, http://projects.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/naco-boldly/

  • Werfel J, Bar-Yam Y, Rus D, Nagpal R (2006) Distributed construction by mobile robots with enhanced building blocks. In: International conference on robotics and automation. IEEE Press

  • Wikipedia: DARPA Grand Challenge (2010) URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

  • Yang Y, Souissi S, Défago X, Takizawa M (2011) Fault-tolerant flocking for a group of autonomous mobile robots. J Syst Softw 84(1):29–36

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been started or completed without the skills, support and enthusiasm of all our colleagues on the CoSMoS project (Stepney et al. 2010), the occam-π and KRoC development teams (Barnes et al. 2010; Sampson et al. 2010a), and the Software Engineering Institute (Carnegie Mellon University). We owe special thanks to Fred Barnes, Carl Ritson, Paul Andrews, John Markus Bjørndalen, Linda Northrop and David Wood. We are also very grateful to our Editors and anonymous referees for their constructive and helpful criticism. Finally, we acknowledge some giants of the field on whose shoulders we gratefully stand: Tony Hoare and Bill Roscoe (CSP), Robin Milner (π-calculus) and David May (classical occam ). This work is part sponsored by the CoSMoS project (EPSRC grants EP/E053505/1 and EP/E049419/1) http://www.cosmos-research.org/. The Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, also hosted and sponsored a sabbatical visit from one of the authors (PHW) at the start of this work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Peter H. Welch

  2. Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Kurt Wallnau & Mark Klein

  3. Institute of Arts, Media and Computer Games, University of Abertay Dundee, Dundee, UK

    Adam T. Sampson

Authors
  1. Peter H. Welch
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Kurt Wallnau
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Adam T. Sampson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Mark Klein
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter H. Welch.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Welch, P.H., Wallnau, K., Sampson, A.T. et al. To boldly go: an occam-π mission to engineer emergence. Nat Comput 11, 449–474 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-012-9304-2

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-012-9304-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation