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January 19, 2005
Papers of possible interest
I (and others?) need to post more regularly to the CSCS weblog. Things that are cool. We should post them.
I'll automate some account creation this weekend, and see what happens.
For the meantime, I thought I'd point to two papers that, if you need some reading material, you may be interested in.
The first is titled A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot
, written by Rodney A. Brooks. This paper lays out the basics of the subsumption architecture for systems control. This involves layering more complex behaviors on top of simpler ones, so you end up with "reflexes" that can override more complex, planned behaviors. For example, you may be looking at something intensely, but if a bit of leaf blows in your eye, you automatically blink. This is because the blink behavior subsumes your conscious desire to (perhaps) read a sign.
The second is for those of you who are interested in concurrency and languages, and want something to wrap your head around. Jingle Bells: Solving the Santa Claus Problem in Polyphonic C# presents a solution to the following problem:
Santa repeatedly sleeps until wakened by either all of his nine reindeer, back from their holidays, or by a group of three of his ten elves. If awakened by the reindeer, he harnesses each of them to his sleigh, delivers toys with them and finally unharnesses them (allowing them to go off on holiday). If awakened by a group of elves, he shows each of the group into his study, consults with them on toy R&D and finally shows them each out (allowing them to go back to work). Santa should give priority to the reindeer in the case that there is both a group of elves and a group of reindeer waiting.
This paper isn't necessarily simple, but it provides an interesting problem that, if you're bored, you might try and tackle in either occam or Java. The former should be much easier than the latter, but either will be challenging just the same.
If you're keen, the Polyphonic C# paper cites an earlier paper by Mordechai Ben-Ari titled How to Solve the Santa Claus Problem. This paper compares a solution written in Ada to a solution written in Java.
While some of you may not enjoy your occam classes, the real world is becoming more and more concurrent/parallel every day. In March the Doctor Dobbs Journal will run an article titled The Free Lunch is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software. It provides an interesting look towards the future and the role concurrency and parallelism will play. Learning occam (or, CSP, if you will) is going to serve you well.
Sorry for preaching there. Anyway. Enjoy.
Posted by mjadud at January 19, 2005 01:49 PM