The Information World (was: Morpheus - the bitter thruth?)

Hi chaz, On Friday, March 08, 2002, 10:46:56 AM, you wrote: c> post it! Here it is... (You can ignore the challenge part...) Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[g--santilli--tiscalinet--it]> -- REBOL Programmer Amigan -- AGI L'Aquila -- REB: http://web.tiscali.it/rebol/index.r A REBOL challenge [Permission is explicitly granted to publish this document on the REBOL Zine, on REBOLForces or on any other REBOL-related publication/site/whatever.] With this message, I'm going to launch a challenge. The goal is to create a peer-to-peer communication system as described below; implementations will be judged by the members of the REBOL mailing list, with regards to: * Code elegance and simplicity * Efficiency * Usability If my free time will permit, I'll participate to the challenge too; a time limit will be set in agreement with the participants. The resulting code is required to be freely distributable at least inside the REBOL mailing list; freely distributable software will be preferred over restricted software because to be useful the system has to be available to all the users of the Internet. [I'm quite sure Maarten will participate with a Rugby based implementation; I'd like to have someone doing a REBOL/IOS based implementation too...] If you are interested, please read the following document carefully; comments or requests for clarifications will be gratefully accepted. [Since this version can be considered a sort of draft, I would be vert grateful to those of you that will really be brave enough to read it all and offer me some comments.] The "Information World" I want to create a sort of "virtual world". I will call it the Information World (IW). This world is made of informations, from static data to "live" entities able to interact with the rest of the IW. The IW is based on three simple entities that the implementation has to represent. These are "Places", "Objects" and "Agents". Places A "Place" is a location in the IW. It can contain objects and agents, and it can be connected to other places. (The connection does not necessarily need to be a TCP/IP connection or something like that; you can think of it as a "road" going from one place to another. Also notice that if place A is connected to place B, automatically place B is connected to place A.) Agents can move from one place to another only using a connection (normal agents cannot create a new connection). The implementation of a place has to provide a way for agents to know what other objects and agents are present in the place. I.e. the agents will have to be able to query the place where they are to know what's there besides of them. Objects Objects are "things", such as repositories, containers, documents, and so on. An object can contain other objects; for example, a book shelf object might contain book objects. By themselves, objects cannot move from one place to another or interact with other objects or agents. Only agents are able to interact with other agents or objects. The implementation should make it easy for objects to be moved from a place to another (by agents); also, agents must be able to query an object to know what actions it can perform on it (for example, a book shelf might provide a "search" action to allow an agent to search for a book, and so on). The implementation has to provide an easy way for users to create new objects. Also, objects can be cloned. Agents Agents are the most interesting entity of the IW. They are the key for the communication, since they are the only entity that can move from a place to another and interact with other entities. They can also carry objects, but there should be a limit on the size of the objects an agent can carry on a given connection. Implementations have to deal with security issues raised by the presence of agents. In particular, two categories of agents have to exist: "Residents" and "Tourists". The only resident agents available should be: * The "Road Builder", which creates connections with other places. It is the only entity that can create connections; of course it can destroy a connection too. * The "Sentinel". A sentinel can be placed on every connection to verify the identity of coming tourists and place restrictions on them or even disallow their entrance. Each sentinel should be in communication with the one on the other side (if present) to be able to identify coming tourists. (Identifying might just mean assigning a "trust level" or something like that.) * The "Mail Agent", which is responsible of sending (big) objects to other places. The mail agents can be asked by an agent to send an object to another mail agent on another place; it should also be possible for mail to be delivered to a specific agent in a place (passing thru the mail agent of that place). The implementation should provide an efficient way to transfer any amount of data. (This makes up for the limit of agents to carry objects; place-to-place connections should be optimized for the transport of tourists with rather small baggage, while mail agent-to-mail agent "connections" might be optimized for transferring big objects.) * The "Banker". A place might have a banker which holds important objects. Objects available in the place can be used (and cloned) by any agent, so a banker might be needed to restrict access to some objects. The implementation should not allow for a tourist to become a resident, unless the user explicitly wants it to (and he/she should be warned that this is a security issue). Residents (sentinels and mail agents in particular) should have a secure way to identify themselves. (There's no reason for a resident to become a tourist and to move from one place to another; anyway, if an implementation allows the user to do this, it should take care of any security issue that may rise.) Tourists can be of any kind and freely move from one place to another (provided they get permission from the sentinels) traveling the IW. The implementation should provide a way for the user to create new tourists. Tourists can be cloned (with or without their baggage :). Also, the user has to have a simple way to instruct a tourist to do something (such as "Go on and search for this book!"). But why? Because it looks like a lot of fun. :-) And also because our brain is just a network of rather simple things... ;)

Hi Gabreiele and all, I'm big fan of simmilar ideas such is building virtual or information worlds. I'm strongly interested especially in the visualisation of this worlds. You could have a look at http://www.cybertown.com . This is really great implementation of virtual community. It is a combination of Java and VRML so you will need to download their VRML plugin but it will be worth to see it ;-) I was always wanted to generate virtual 3D worlds using Rebol. Long time ago I was experimenting with REBOL generated static VRML worlds...lot of fun ;-) I just hope one day we could make such things without the VRML, directly in Rebol/View's 3D dialect. Regards, Cyphre ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gabriele Santilli" <[g--santilli--tiscalinet--it]> To: "chaz" <[rebol-list--rebol--com]> Sent: Friday, March 08, 2002 2:14 PM Subject: [REBOL] Re: The Information World (was: Morpheus - the bitter thruth?)

> I'm big fan of simmilar ideas such is building virtual or information > worlds. I'm strongly interested especially in the visualisation of this > worlds. You could have a look at http://www.cybertown.com . This is really > great implementation of virtual community. It is a combination of Java and > VRML so you will need to download their VRML plugin but it will be worth

> see it ;-) > I was always wanted to generate virtual 3D worlds using Rebol. Long time

> I was experimenting with REBOL generated static VRML worlds...lot of fun

> I just hope one day we could make such things without the VRML, directly

> Rebol/View's 3D dialect.

Hi Cyphre I have the information that the author of the french book on Rebok, Olivier Auverlot, is working on a 3D dialect. I dont know how his work in this direction is now... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Cyphre" <[cyphre--seznam--cz]> To: <[rebol-list--rebol--com]> Sent: Monday, March 11, 2002 10:06 AM Subject: [REBOL] Re: The Information World (was: Morpheus - the bitter thruth?)