Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Object Orientation, The Internet and Virtual Intelligent Machines

Looking at he last entry in this blog all I could see was a writhing pile of individual but related ideas having interacting relationships lie a pile of snakes all inter-twined. How to straighten them all our and lay them in an orderly structure?  It is a herding cats problem domain aimed at getting ducks in a row!


If I was anyone who is not me (that's binary?) then I would look at what I wrote and say:  This guy needs to a take a day and go searching for the bottle that makes him one short of a six pack.

True.  My days off to find that bottle are actually nights.  Sleep is a different state of mind where things emerge out of nothing take some form upon waking.  If I am quick enough to grab the dream state shadow on the wall when I wake up and am equally swift in going go to the source that cast it in that brief transition from sleep to awake state I can carry it (or enough of its essence) into the place where I can examine it with a cup of coffee.

That is where I am at the start of this blog entry.

Object Oriented thinking straightens out everything.  The shadow of what that thought was on the wall with full recognition of its meaning as well as full integrated substance structure.  A dream vision that was a beauty to behold.  Freud would explain it I suppose and the relation of the shadow level to the conscious level, etc.  The waking thought that I grabbed at that instant of transition to take with me to the light of day was this:  (Paragraph break here for emphasis, sound the horns!)

The Internet is the finest Object Oriented structure that we have ever created.  Yesterday I was thinking of the elegant beauty of the IP system, IP version 6 now and how it ties objects together in the Internet of Things.  After writing the last blog entry yesterday I thought more about IP and its IP named things being intelligent object nodes in the system with methods and methods.  All of them physical things. After publishing the blog entry yesterday I went on to look again at the IP system.

Devices in the IP internet system are physical things we can get our hands on like a cell phone.  Good example.  People can understand that.  I bought a 65 inch 4k Ultra HD TV recently.  It has an IP address and is a thing on the IoT.  I interact with it like a cell phone however the last time I put my hands on it will probably be when I set it on the table and plugged it in to the electrical system.  A system of an Integration of Things like the Internet of Things. 

The IoT meta level domain is one of physical things relating physically to each other.  Externally the IoT  relates directly in form and function to  an analogous conceptual logical structure of equal magnitude.  They are both operating systems that support applications and are at the most granular level related by the binary concept of Presence/Absence through electrical representation at the machine level of True/False at the conceptual level. 

Yesterday I realized that the Internet and the concept of Internet of Things is really all about physical things and their physical structure in an Internet to serve the conceptual or software side operating and application system.  Researching that thought on Google I found some reference to ideas that IP numbers that tie the IoT system together could also be assigned to virtual things called Virtual Machines.  That is some powerful idea!  Machines with all the attributes, methods and messaging abilities of the real thing but implemented in a conceptual software structure.

It gets as complicated as time travel!

It takes some creative thinking to see how it all ties together like I saw in my sleep last night and grabbed just enough of a key handle on it all to carry into today.  The key handle is that all of my thoughts about the monetary system, what money is and does in current system structure and what it should be in a restructured system is object based.  One way to express it is that I envision a virtual cash system existing on a virtual machine operating and application system not just modeled on IP but existing in an IP structure that ties it all together.

Object Oriented thinking is so much easier for me.

Bucando muy temprano en la manana

I went to Google.  Entered this:  "Internet is an Object Oriented System". I, an intelligent object sent a message to another intelligent object a message it had a method to perform and return a result.

The result: 
No results found for "internet is an Object Oriented system". Results for internet is an Object Oriented system (without quotes).  Then, course there were many matches for these words but not for the string in quotes.  The search string in quotes seems like a reasonable thought string that someone entered somewhere on the WWW that Google crawls and indexes.

Nope.  No joy.  But on the other hand: Joy!  Once again I claim fame of first entry of a simple short expression of a simple thought to the WWW that nobody ever made before and claim it for my very own creation.  May its eminence of existence in the public domain enjoy its free range and forever be attached to the context of this blog entry as an object thing thought created by me.

I, however, am a micro midget standing on  the shoulders of Giants.  The basic idea was introduced by a genius: Dr. Alan Kay.  While he did not say it exactly this way he used the meaning of the words rather than the expression of the string to say the same thing.  My expression in quotes is simple a reduction to a logical concept called "equal"  This equals that.  I will simply bask in his light and give true credit where it is due.

Dr. Kay wrote the first book I bought and read on programming.  Smalltalk 80.  That was back in the 80's.  This morning I enjoyed catching up on his progress through history and contribution to its making since then.


He refers to the Internet (TCP/IP) as being one of the few large-scale software projects that was properly engineered where its level of complication is balanced by its level of complexity which was achieved in < 20k LOC that acts behaves like a living, dynamic system able to handle billions of nodes that has never been stopped after it was turned on in September, 1969. As this was so rare many people don’t consider the Internet as normal software made by man:
"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."

Further in the Deep Insights link:

He had this to say of the Internet - which he considers is “possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order”:
"To me, one of the nice things about the semantics of real objects is that they are “real computers all the way down (RCATWD)” – this always retains the full ability to represent anything. The old way quickly gets to two things that aren’t computers – data and procedures – and all of a sudden the ability to defer optimizations and particular decisions in favour of behaviours has been lost. In other words, always having real objects always retains the ability to simulate anything you want, and to send it around the planet. … And RCATWD also provides perfect protection in both directions. We can see this in the hardware model of the Internet (possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order).....emphasis mine....You get language extensibility almost for free by simply agreeing on conventions for the message forms. My thought in the 70s was that the Internet we were all working on alongside personal computing was a really good scalable design, and that we should make a virtual internet of virtual machines that could be cached by the hardware machines. It’s really too bad that this didn’t happen. If ‘real objects’ are RCATWD, then each object could be implemented using the programming language most appropriate for its intrinsic nature, which would give new meaning to the phrase ‘polyglot programming.’"
 Yup!  Nuff said.

My problem domain of Money takes on a new conceptual view.  One in which the Object Oriented concept of the Internet really does serve as a model of choice in a problem domain where optimizing system design and integration with absolute reduction in error of structure and operation is vital. 

In my Digital Monetary system the three main Objects are Users, Currency and Accounts.  Each is a distinct and inter-related fundamental Intelligent Virtual Machine in the system.  All tied together as Virtual Machines by sharing the Object Oriented Attributes, Methods and Messages of a Parent Object Class:Internet Protocol.

Each instance of the aggregate class is discretely identified  by an IP number in the system each unique User, Unit of Currency and Account.  Sub-net object IP extension as required by UML design.

User entities are all people using the broad concept of business entities as people with a broad identity attribute of a business entity being one that has the same attribute as a human being called "ownership" that gets into "rights" and all that requires specification of what attribute rights as children of what Parent Class are involved and their associated Methods and Messages. 

In my Walled Garden Monetary System.

All discrete object units of Users have an IPv6 number. In the Walled Garden Monetary System.

All discrete object units of Currency at the unit value of One have an IPv6 number.

All discrete object units of Account have an IPv6 number.

Anyone is free to enter and play by the rules and regs and agreement of terms.

The physical system structure of the Internet is to date the finest of a long line of Objects we have created to serve us.  It gives us a bridge as well as a model to build farther into the construction of Conceptual Objects of the Information Age to serve us as well as the Physical Objects of the Industrial Age. 

The Internet viewed in retrospect from a future where we can see the forest for the trees just might be looked at as the bridge that emerged from the Industrial Age to take us into the Information Age. 

Hopefully, from the point of view looking forward into the future that bridge will take us to a place where Conceptual design object systems and their operation based on reason and logic will dominate by elimination of dysfunctional systems and subsystems of the Industrial Age.

Was the Industrial Age driven more by the design development importance of what things can do more than what they are because the Industrial Age worked with given natural physical resources to put them together to assemble the products of the Industrial Age that have advanced us>

In the Information Age design development of what things can do becomes a function not of putting together physical resources like the Industrial Age, although that will always continue to give us better physical things,  but creating the Big Conceptual Object thing resources analogous to physical natural resources that at the most fundamental level were made for us to work with? 

In the Information Age we create the fundamental building blocks assembled to serve us and the nature of the conceptual entities to be created shifts the focus of what things do in the Industrial Age based on their given attributes to what those object attributes are that we build into them in Information Age that enable them to do something.

It is a shift from Function Orientation driven construction of physical things in the past to Object Orientation of constructing conceptual objects and their inherent attributes and associated methods in the future.

There are many current legacy systems from prior ages that continue to exert their functions on society because the were functionally oriented designed systems in the first place.  Where these systems involve concepts more or exclusive of physical natural resources in their nature, Object Oriented driven design becomes more important to produce a desired function by building into the object concept what it needs to do, not applying what needs to be done to the object to make it work as a thing that we want to do something. 

Design what Money Currency is at the granular level and it will do what we want it to do.

The legacy design was driven by what Money Currency does.  In that system Currency does not have conceptual intelligence to employ its own unique attributes, methods and messages to be an intelligent virtual machine.  That is what is necessary to build into it to serve us better.











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