And to think that none of this loafing would exist or matter forty years ago.Ah, but there's where you're wrong. This is a project that got started more than forty years ago. This is serious vaporware.
We have two separate canopies over the Ent, is that good enough?YOU DID ACCOUNT FOR CRUST, DIDN'T YOU?!"
::dives for cover::
Oh, I'm surely wrong more than just there, but it is kind of you to say it. Did this logic construct exist for computer programming before the personal computer, or are you saying that it was created theoretically even before there was an application for it? Or perhaps you're saying something else entirely.
Two canopies sound sound, but who'll hear them if no one's around?
Round like a circle like a spiral like a wheel within a wheel. You inspire me:
To Gary
From "Coder"
Re: doc MorF wire agate?
You have expanded my mind, sir.
You have expanded my mind, sir.Excuse me while I kiss the sky.
Purple Loaf, is in his brain
Lately Gary's losing sleep againHe's feeling funny and he don't know why
One of the objects... ah yes, the sky... thank you, Aubrey. That solves it entirely.
In that song's backseat, there was only dry loafin' going on, I assure you.
There ain't no way he's ever gonna loaf her.
Different song but loaf remains the same.
Senior Software Developer
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Trawling through the archives over the holidays, I discovered this gem:
"Each inner loaf just holds a distinction region. The left child is all the data inside the distinction, the right child is all the data outside the distinction."
An amazing insight. No wonder the ent is so spare.
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Senior Software Developer
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Prequel: Those which are now abstract.
AboraHeaper, AbstractRecorderFinder, Accumulator, ActualOPart, AgendaItem, AnyRecorderFinder, Arrangement, ArrayStepper, BeRangeElement, BertPropFinder, BootMaker, BootPlan, BranchDescription, ByteShuffler, CacheManager, CalcCreator, CanopyCrum, CategoryTable, ChunkCleaner, Connection, Converter, Cookbook, CoordinateSpace, CopyRecipe, Counter, CrossMapping, CrossRegion, CrossSpace, CxxClassDescription.
DetectorEvent, DiskManager, Dsp, EdgeManager, EditionRecorder, EditionRecorderFossil, Emulsion, Encrypter, FDListener, FeConcreteWrapperSpec, FeDataHolder, FeFillDetector, FeFillRangeDetector, FeHyperRef, FeLockSmith, FePlaceHolder, FeRangeElement, FeRevisionDetector, FeSession, FeStatusDetector, FeWaitDetector, FeWrapperDef, FeWrapperSpec, Filter, Fn, FullPropChange, GrandEntry, HashSet, HashTable, HeaperAsPosition, HistoryCrum.
IdentityDsp, IEEE128, ImmuSet, ImmuTable, InnerLoaf, IntegerTable, IntegerTableStepper, Mapping, MuArray, MuSet, MuSetTester, MuTable, OberIntegerTable, OExpandingLoaf, OrderSpec, OrglRoot, PacketPortal, Portal, Position, PrimArray, PrimDataArray, PrimFloatArray, PrimFloatValue, PrimIntArray, PrimIntegerArray, PrimSpec, PrimValue, Prop, PropChange, PropChanger, PropFinder.
Rcvr, RealEdge, RealPos, RecorderFossil, RegionTester, RepairEngineer, RequestHandler, ResultRecorder, SanitationEngineer, Scrambler, ScruSet, ScruSetTester, ScruTable, SensorPropFinder, SequenceEdge, ServerChunk, ServerLoop, SetRegion, SimpleRecorderFinder, SpecialistRcvr.
SpecialistXmtr, Stepper, StubRecipe, TableAccumulator, TableEntry, TableStepper, Thunk, TracePosition, TransferSpecialist, TransitionEdge, Tuple, Turtle, UnOrdered, WorkRecorder, WorkRecorderFossil, WrappedLoaf, XcvrMaker, Xmtr, XnReadStream, XnRegion, XnWriteStream.
...they don't pay you enough.
Seriously, if you are not making $150,000+ a year you are being used.
Start your own consulting company, and bill them by the hour!
Well, Paizo certainly isn't paying me to do this!
And I had the consulting company for many years. Turns out it feels goooood to get a regular paycheck.
I am happy for you! :)
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Well, Paizo certainly isn't paying me to do this!
And I had the consulting company for many years. Turns out it feels goooood to get a regular paycheck.
I hear ya...I'm trying pretty desperately to get on full time at my current gig.
Seriously, if you are not making $150,000+ a year you are being used.
I'm being used...are you hiring?
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um...? is it like a metaphore? but what is a meta for? am I better for the metaphore? it is no bore, my metaphore. But I implore, is the metaphore of a whore, a boar with a chore? alas, no more.
sorry I have a 2 year old and too much Dr. Suess
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Senior Software Developer
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I have been giving Xmtr and Rcvr the stinkeye for some time now. But after reviewing the capabilities and drawbacks of built-in serialization, I have decided to give them a reprieve. They'll perform better, use less space and I won't need to rewrite them. Which is a Good Thing.
Still not sure about Snarfs, Turtles, Recipes and Cookbooks, though. To say nothing of SnarfPackers! You're all still on The List.
Oh, and Fossils get a pass. For now.
A place where nobody dared to go; the love that we came to know. They call it Xanadu; and now, open your eyes and see.
GAAAAAAAAAAHH! My eyes! Take away the dreaded "X-word". Ill do what you say.
What X-word? Xap? Xip? Xylophone?
Ah, yes. I see.
Digital Pest
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ThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunk ThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunk ThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunk ThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunkThunk ThunkThunkThunk
This thread has killed my lingering desire to join the collective. ;)
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Senior Software Developer
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This thread has killed my lingering desire to join the collective. ;)
Would it help if I pointed out that this has nothing to do with Paizo?
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Senior Software Developer
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The Contraption is a monstrous beast of a thing. Forty years in the making. Built by a series of devoted madmen who believed they understood the future and sought to shape the world into a utopia. They kept its secrets for decades, knowing its power, and hoping to profit when it would be finally, triumphally, unleashed on an unsuspecting humanity.
But changing the world is hard. And the task they set for themselves may have been, in the end, quite impossible. So the years passed and the madmen built, and built, and built. They tore it down completely and rebuilt from the ground up time after time. This one will be so much more powerful than the last incarnation! We'd be fools not to pursue this path. And so they discarded work as they proceeded, three years here, five years there.
Near the end of its chaotic pre-life (two-steps-forward, three-steps-backward, four-steps-forward the entire way), the Contraption was nearly complete. Given a simple task, it could mostly do it. The madmen believed that with just a few more months of preparation, it would be ready to unveil. All they needed was time. And time is money. And they didn't have it. All they had was a nearly-working world-changing thing and the expertise to make it really work -- if they only had the time.
Then they got some money. Actually quite a bit of money. A golden opportunity! We can finally realize our vision!
As is often the case, the money probably caused more problems than it solved. All the caretakers of the Contraption were true believers. But as true believers of good faith are wont to do, some disagreed with their peers. We can use this money to finish the Contraption once and for all! was pitted against If we rebuild it just one last time, it will be more powerful than we ever imagined. We'd be fools not to pursue this path.
The high priest, the original visionary, the voice howling in the wilderness, the genius who insisted that the Contraption could be made to work, the one who convinced the true believers of the rightness of their quest and what it would mean for the world at large... well, he tried to reign them all in, tried to be the voice of sanity and reason and provide the guidance they desperately needed at that late hour.
I think you can guess which path they chose, given that the world hasn't been changed, and the name of the Contraption is not a household word. The latest model of the Contraption, the one that nearly worked, was scrapped. Work began on a new one. Its design was bold. Actually, breathtaking in scope, even compared to previous attempts, the ones that would change the world. This truly was an amazing undertaking.
The madmen built. They tore down and built again. They built with a frenzy. Throughout the history of the Contraption, they had made new names for the things they were building because they were things never seen before in the world. (Enfilades. Tumblers. Disps. Wids. Crums.) But now, they made new names and discarded them at a furious pace. Grabbers, Orgls, IObjects, Waldoes and many others existed, but only for a very brief time. They created Snarfs, Butterflies, Shepherds, Abrahams, Fossils, Turtles, Pumpkins and Flocks. They built Fluids and Emulsions, TrailBlazers and Canopies, BertCrums and CanopyCrums.
They invented their own language -- beyond the Crums and Snarfs and whatnot -- they actually created their own language, their own grammar, their own vocabulary, to describe their creation, because it could not be properly bound using any current language. Think of a vision so powerful it could not be expressed in English, or French, or Latin, or Swahili. Their project required crazy things, so they did those things, because they were necessary.
The money ran out before they finished.
The faithful left because they had to. The visionary moved on. Fifteen years ago the Contraption was abandoned, half-built, its parts scattered across the floor in an abandoned warehouse, gathering dust. The end.
Or not the end. In the waning days of the previous century, the visionary and the remaining faithful madmen agreed to set the Contraption free. They renounced their decades of secrecy, let go of their dreams of making a new world out of whole cloth, and gave their secrets to anyone who would listen.
There was a brief flurry of attention, followed by a years-long lull. The Contraption was in pieces and didn't work and was only described in a language that was only spoken by the madmen themselves. No one could understand quite what was being described. The vision was clear, if you stood 30,000 feet above it. But the details were hopelessly complicated. Many people tried, but failed, to do anything useful with the detritus of the thing.
A few years ago one person actually translated what had been written into a modern language. Well, part of it anyway. Kind of like the septuagint being translated into english, except the septuagint is the original and the greek is the translation and, well, anyway, it's complicated but this person did it. The Contraption wouldn't do anything, but at least those who had eyes to see could read what was going on.
And another couple years intervene with no one really making anything of the Contraption, even in its newly translated form.
So, the Loaf Question.
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Senior Software Developer
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Umm. Postmonster. (Mr. Teter). May I have the temerity to inquire if you are one of the original visionaries, or just someone trying to pick up the pieces afterwards?
I believed, as did thousands of others, but I was not on any of the original teams. I am, as you say, picking up the pieces.
And did the original guys write their own programming language, or was that the actual 'contraption' that they never quite finished?
The language was necessary for their vision of the Contraption, but it was not the Contraption itself.
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Senior Software Developer
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I shall go one step further. Is the contraption an operating system then, or something much, much, more complicated than that?
It's not an operating system. On the other hand, the original goal of the builders is to store all knowledge, and all variations of it, which in the end is probably a complex proposition.
(And I am slightly concerned now, given the unique nature of the project, as to whether or not the unique programming language will be dependent upon hardware that uses a specific verson of machine code?)
The original contraption was built so it could work anywhere and everywhere. (Indeed, the vision required this.) The choices the faithful made when they built it were logical at the time, but may not be appropriate anymore. The incarnation of the beast I am exploring promises to work everywhere, but it still retains answers to questions which may have since been answered.
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Senior Software Developer
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From the many I bring few.
Those pieces which exist on their own, I examine and classify.
There are many pieces to the contraption, and I have whittled away those I believe to be unnecessary. (Some things may come back, but I don't think so.)
The remaining substance among the dross have been designated as belonging to particular groupings. Taxonomy is important in these sorts of endeavours.
The Be (or "back-end"). The Collections. The Ent. The Fe (or "front-end"). The Security stuff. The Snarf things. The Spaces. The things which are tests. The Urdi. The utilities. Those things which will probably go away (xpp, xcvr).
There are, of course, sub-categories. There are basic spaces, cross spaces, edge spaces, filter spaces, integer spaces and unordered spaces. The subclassifications for many things are currently mostly silly. Backrecs? Canopies (of which there are finders and props)? Ents? Fossils? Traces? Turtles (please!)?
OExpandingLoaf has three children: OPartialLoaf, RegionLoaf and OVirtualLoaf. InnerLoaf, sibling of OExpandingLoaf, has two children: SplitLoaf and DspLoaf. We shall speak no further about DspLoaf.
...
Here's the problem: The Loafs that can become a SplitLoaf (OPartialLoaf, OVirtualLoaf and RegionLoaf) are actually cousins of SplitLoaf instead of siblings. If LoafWrapper is a member of the RegionLoaf family, then it can't pretend to be a SplitLoaf -- they're not directly related.
What family should LoafWrapper be a part of?
The parent of OExpandingLoaf and InnerLoaf.
Dude. Please convince them to let you out so you can come to Gencon. I'll buy, really. Bring Cosmo if you can. Screw games. Drinks and conversation are all I need.
Seriously. He speaks truth!
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Senior Software Developer
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Huh...
Whoa. Not to catalog all knowledge. Just to store it. (And all its variations.)
The madmen were nothing if not ambitious.
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Senior Software Developer
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Spelunking in the depths
I spent most of today crawling around inside the contraption, watching it work. I tell it to stop here, so I can look around, examine its parts, then proceed, and stop again. It's fascinating, and a little awe-inspiring. I may be the first explorer to see these things in action in over fifteen years.
The contraption remembers. That's what it's built to do. You tell it secrets, and they are dutifully stored away in an ever-branching, walking tree of long memory. It knows everything it's ever been told. It knows who told it. And if you change your mind, it remembers both the new secret, and the old, and what parts of the new secret were taken from the old. It remembers if you've combined two or more secrets. It can tell you what secrets contain other secrets, even secrets that have since been changed. It knows what secrets simply refer to other secrets. It knows every revision of everything it's ever been told to remember.
So. Tell it a secret. Say, "Mary had a little lamb." What gears grind, what trees are splayed, what crums and loafs and regions and other magical things are built to remember your secret?
First it translates your secret into a series of numbers. Machines prefer the cold precision of numbers, and the contraption is hardly unique in performing this step.
Then the numbers are translated into an FeEdition, which maps from a Region in IntegerSpace to the series of numbers. This Region is a simple region, having two well-defined boundaries (the left edge, and the right edge).
But this FeEdition must have a BeEdition, which has been created with the approval and assistance of the BeGrandMap. (I am not entirely sure what the BeGrandMap is for yet, but I believe it probably provides some sort of global tracking mechanism for everything else. It has an Ent of its own, but in my brief sojourns into the belly of the beast I did not see that ent do anything.)
So the BeGrandMap creates an orgl from the series of numbers. An Arrangement of the Region is constructed. That is used to create a Loaf (yay, Loafs are back!), in this case an OVirtualLoaf, which uses the Arrangement's region and a SharedData consisting of the series of numbers. (For those keeping score at home, WrappedLoaf creates the Loaf for us.)
This Loaf, along with the Region, are used to create an ActualOrglRoot. The ActualOrglRoot thinks the Loaf is a fullcrum, and in the future will refer to it as "myO," and add itself as myO's "oParent". It also retrieves the Loaf's sensorCrum (making a new one if the Loaf hadn't provided one, but in this case it did), and creates a new myHCrum. The ActualOrglRoot asks the sensorCrum to add a pointer to the ActualOrglRoot.
So now we have an OrglRoot. The contraption uses that to construct a BeEdition. A BeEdition is actually a kind of BeRangeElement, so it creates a new myHCrum and takes the SensorCrum as mySensorCrum. (There is a note in the literature that this BeEdition should not have the same SensorCrum as its OrglRoot, but it does anyway.) The BeEdition also has some BertProps and detectors, but those won't come into play until we ask the machine to tell us about a secret it already knows. (Remember, we're just asking the machine to remember a new secret right now.)
The BeEdition takes the OrglRoot as myOrglRoot, then asks the OrglRoot to introduce the BeEdition. The OrglRoot asks its myHCrum (newly created above) to introduce the BeEdition. And the HBottomCrum (for that is what it is) introduces the BeEdition into its myEditions, which is an ActualHashSet, and I won't go further into what happens there, for at that level the contraption resembles other modern machines of its type.
The HBottomCrum, after introducing the BeEdition, then proceeds to screw up my earlier assertion that BertProps and the like won't come into play just yet. The contraption schedules a propChanger for TheBertPropChange.
(The propChanger has an Agenda, and will do something which I probably won't go into here. To create it, a Stepper steps over all the HBottomCrum's myEditions and creates an AgendaItem which contains a change for each BeEdition's BertProp. Finally, the HBottomCrum's myBertCrum is asked to create an overall PropChange, which, according to the literature, will at each step update myPropJoint and move to parent. Aren't you glad I'm not going into more detail here?)
And now the OrglRoot has introduced the BeEdition to its myHCrum, and so we have a BeEdition. This is used to create a new FeEdition "on" the BeEdition, with a "fake" FeLabel (which apparently means the label will be made on demand later, but at least it references a BeLabel). Since the label is faked, the contraption doesn't add a FeRangeElement for the label. The FeEdition remembers the BeEdition as myBeEdition, and the label as myLabel.
The BeEdition is now asked to add the FeEdition as an FeRangeElement. The BeEdition uses a PrimSet to store its FeRangeElements so I won't describe this particular process further because all modern machines have sets.
So now the contraption knows that "Mary had a little lamb."
Spelunking has its thrills, but it's hard to see the forest for the trees, pardon the expression. I think I'd like to take some pictures.
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Senior Software Developer
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Today I started work on a device which allows me to make pictures of the inner workings of the contraption. Eventually movies would be nice but for now stills are enough to see the incredible complexity of its workings.
Right now the pictures are mostly black and white. Proper colorization will require much greater understanding of the structure. And the device I built hardly knows anything about what it's looking at, so the picture starts out all jumbled up and mostly incomprehensible. I've been sorting things out manually, but I'd prefer the machines do my lazy work for me.
I'd like to post some pictures, but the device I built isn't yet taking into account LoafWrappers, so the pictures produced so far are wrong. Compelling and pretty, but wrong.
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Spelunking in the depths...
I'm telling you, this sounds like a cavern to the simple crawl space of the Rete Algorithm (of which I am intimately familiar, or at least was back in the day).
Plus, some would call you an archaeologist - but I prefer spelunker.
Today I started work on a device which allows me to make pictures of the inner workings of the contraption.
Do they look like this?