Behind the curtains

This section continues to describe Numbo through the words of Daniel Defays. Numbo is a lot like Jumbo, and therefore aptly named. I’ve remarked in the past that I find the interaction between different sorts of data in a “cytoplasm” interesting and that I’d like to apply or see it applied to other types of data. Numbo does exactly this. Naturally, the exact rules are somewhat different; Jumbo’s purpose is to work with characters while Numbo is strictly concerned with arithmetic.

The attractiveness of data here is evaluated by a particular class of codelet. A piece of data’s attractiveness isn’t relevant to itself, only to the system. With lack of interactivity and the passage of time, attractiveness decreases. Is this also a codelet or is it some automated background process that regularly occurs? While important to the function of Numbo, it seems to me this would pollute the Coderack with maintenance functions. Furthermore, since this action occurs regularly it seems to be exempt from the Coderack’s probabilistic choice algorithm.

Temperature seems to be a function of how many individual parts are floating around in the cytoplasm. Temperature seems like a different sort of process from the attractiveness maintenance.

Consider the Coderack itself. The rack is drawn from by this choice algorithm and codelets that get activated from it may queue more actions. Is there a bound to the size of this Coderack or is it boundless? Once all the data is used up and only one large glom exists, what happens to all the queued actions? If the glom, in the case of Numbo, is correct the program simply completes its run and exits. If the result is not correct, Numbo backtracks in the form of dissolving codelets. I’d imagine the non-applicable codelets simply fizzle as Hofstadter suggested when discussing Jumbo. What if, by chance, a codelet from several building/decomposition cycles ago activates? Is there some process that scans the rack for outdated codelets at some point?

These are just some things that occurred to me while reading about Numbo.