(04.10.95) Computing As Compression: The Sp Theory and the Sp System. After reading this summary, I have still no idea what they are talking about. If _that_ ain't an indicator of a new paradigm!
(26.09.95) Futurist Programming: Manifesto (a joke), Background (a critique), and Notes (a good reading list, some cheap slogans, fun exercises that should be part of any "introduction to SE" curriculum, a scathing application of OO design methodology to a real-world example, a good priorities list)
A first step into that direction is that Noweb (Regrettably, the sources in Stuttgart are without the nice HTML doc of the bellcore site) ``now comes with a simple LaTeX-to-HTML converter''.
What is an Agent?
Carl Hewitt recently remarked that the question what is an agent? is embarrassing for the agent-based computing community in just the same way that the question what is intelligence is embarrassing for the mainstream AI community. The problem is that although the term is widely used, by many people working in closely related areas, it defies attempts to produce a single universally accepted definition.
quoted from:
Mike Wooldridge and Nick Jennings, 1994
Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice
http://www.doc.mmu.ac.uk/STAFF/mike/ker95.ps
(Haven't read it myself yet. I know that Hewitt's actors and agents are historically important to the development of Scheme, Smalltalk, Self, and all those others funky modern experimental languages that try to go beyond the classical paradigms. (In case you didn't know, think about what an "object" is: something with a state, that reacts to messages by sending out a replay, maybe by sending out other messages, maybe by changing state. Now think about what a closure is: a thing that has state (lexically bound variables), that accepts messages (function calls), that returns a value (except when it doesn't terminate, as with continuations), and that may call other closures. Now what is an actor? A thing with a state, that can accept messages (or events), ... you see the picture. Except that actors (or agents) can be "autonomous", i.e. their execution can be in parallel, and they can act on their own. But the latter can be explained away by a global clock to which every actor is connected, and the former is nothing new to pure functional evaluation methods.) I really should read the HOPL (I,II) proceedings one of these days.)
The School of Communications Design and Institute for Language, Technology, and Publications Design is home to hypertext authors Nancy Kaplan and Stuart Moulthrop. They are also initiators of CREW (FAQ, Signatories) (Compact for Responsive Electronic Writing), a ``non-binding, strictly symbolic agreement among World Wide Web authors promising to open their documents to links proposed by others in the community''. The list of signatories is a good starting point if you search people interested in THT.
Kia Mennie's page on hypertext and literary things
(02.05.95) Amongst its many other attractions, the Seven by Nine Squares now features a collection of emblems (aka icons, aka pictograms). Some of them are obivous, some not (architecture, cinema, concept/conception, continuity, critique, memory, system, trace), some I don't get at all (absence, arrogance, auto-reference, contemporary-colonial, work, writing), and some are funny once you know them (censorship, commemorative place, curiosity, installation).