Singularity programming design

Scope

Having touched on the possibility, both in terms of its theory and very briefly its application, of singularity programming as an alternative programming model, we now focus on the kind of design it would embody.

Platform games

Facebook took the world by storm in 2007 and was voted favourite technology by many leading technology readers. Was it just a gimmick? A fad? Marc Andreessen, respected software engineer, entrepeneur, and co-founder of Ning, lauded Facebook's adoption of an API model. "My personal opinion is that the new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry", he stated unequivocally on his blog.

In his analysis of Facebook's success, Andreessen cites the advantages of a platform over an application, including the "walled gardens" of closed solutions that have been knocked off the playing field by the openness of the web.

It seems that it should almost go without saying, but apparently it takes someone with Andreessen's clout and standing to put one and one together: solutions that have been fully crystallised by developers fare less well than those that can be reprogrammed. Platforms, in other words, are flexible to users' needs and input.

This distinction is not dissimilar to the evolution of unusual states we discussed before. An "event handling" program has the potential to deal with unusual data or events in a way that is mostly hardcoded. As a result, perturbations that vary too much from the anticipated will either be rejected outright or alternatively push the system to an unusable state with no differentiation of function possible in that new state.

But what if "unusual data" is not a rogue Denial of Service attack, but instead represented users' varying needs?

Design class

In cellular activity prior to individuation and the formation of tissue and organs, cells are considered pluripotent. In other words they have the ability to be any one of several cell types. In fully individuated humans there are 254 different types of cells. Jellyfish have about three.

During experiments the researcher and theorist Stuart Kauffman found that the process of induction, i.e. when cell collectives suppress or enhance cellular differentiation in other collectives via signals, there are "recurrent patterns of gene activity within these networks, patterns which exhibit the kind of homeostatic stability associated with attractors" (DeLanda, p. 65). Those attractors, he concluded, represent consistent cell types.

Object orientation is only one of several models available to the computer scientist, but it is particularly suited to our theory. Objects are like cells in the sense that they hide certain kinds of information (as cells would contain the cytoplasm or nucleus that in turn contains the chromosomes and DNA) that are nevertheless vitally important to their eventual, activated functionality.

If we extend our analogy of cells at the level of pluripotent collectives to the layer of possibility in a pre-formed system (please note: I am using the term pre-formed in the sense of "unformed but will eventually be formed" not in the sense of "already formed prior usage"), we have the corresponding notion of signals that could determine the type of cell available to the collective for tissue building or, in the case of a system, the kinds of input that could determine the type of object available for component building.

It is a bit like the problem of cross-cutting concerns that have annoyed developers for years. Some kinds of functionality do not have a core function (logging is the classic example) but nevertheless requires implementation across the majority of classes (objects) which themselves are meant to solve the problem of a separation of concerns. Input data that try to find a matching pattern in a pre-formed system cut across all classes (pre-formed objects).

But cross-cutting concerns are already well defined problems, whereas the problems to be dealt with at the pre-formed object level are not well defined yet. In our example an undefined perturbation to the system is precisely the cause of variation and diversity at the next level: the component level. Until the data has found a way to fit itself in available classes (not necessarily in a complete way) the differentiated class cannot emerge. Likewise, in its evolutionary form, a new class may emerge that instantiates clusters of objects and a component that is ultimately rejected. It is therefore expected to be an evolutionary process.

By focusing on differentiation - i.e. the evolution of a system from its classes designed by a separation of concerns to differentiated (instantiated) objects to components through to a fully realised and differentiated product - the availability of unrealised objects that have the ability to change state according to unpremeditated signals (data or events) are neglected.

Faceless

If Facebook is truly a leap forward for the internet it is immensely exciting to speculate what it could be if not just external programmers but also users had the ability to contribute radically to the platform. It is in part the satisfaction of users' diverse needs to play and interact with objects and people in the environment that drives the thriving communities of Second Life and World of Warcraft.

In the singularity programming environment this level of interaction is envisaged as part of an evolving dialogue initiated by signals to a pre-formed layer of digital object possibility where classes enhance and suppress information to form new types of objects. These objects then cluster together to structure novel components and building blocks to respond to the information contained in the user's signal.