The Ecology of Computation

by B.A. Huberman (Editor)

Propelled by advances in software design and increasing connectivity, distributed computational systems are acquiring characteristics reminiscent of social and biological organizations. This volume is a collection of articles dealing with the nature, design and implementation of these open computational systems.

Although varied in their approach and methodology, the articles are related by the goal of understanding and building computational ecologies. They are grouped in three major sections. The first deals with general issues underlying open systems, studies of computational ecologies, and their similarities with social organizations. The second part deals with actual implementations of distributed computation, and the third discusses the overriding problem of designing suitable languages for open systems.

All the articles are highly interdisciplinary, emphasizing the application of ecological ideas, game theory, market mechanisms, and evolutionary biology in the study of open systems.

348 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Nelson Minar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Broader approaches to computation, from a book with a very suggestive title. This collection of essays inside has been influential to me. In my own research I've been trying to think of computation from different points of view than just the strict Turing machine model, in particular Artificial Life ideas. The ideas here are really helpful, especially the Agoric Computation papers which develop an interesting vision of distributed object computation based on an economic model. The book is hard to find and very expensive. Happily, the Agorics papers are available online.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

An out of print collection of papers which I believe gives hints as to where computing systems might go in the future. Agoric computing, software agents, and other approaches which are just starting to enter the mainstream were discussion in this book. More than any other computer science text, this book fired my imagination, and made me consider that there were revolutionary approaches which might be able to address righteous problems that couldn't be solved by brute force. Reading this book was one of the factors that lead me to take a job at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.