T 4-6, 36-144
Profs. Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman, NE43-429, x5856 and NE43-428, x5874; and Dr. Tom Knight, NE43-735, x7807
2-0-10
Prereq: permission of instructor
A colony of cells cooperates to form a multicellular organism under the direction of a genetic program shared by the members of the colony. A swarm of bees cooperates to construct a hive. Humans group together to build towns, cities, and nations. These examples raise fundamental questions for the organization of computing systems:
How do we obtain coherent behavior from the cooperation of large numbers of unreliable parts that are interconnected in unknown, irregular, and time-varying ways?
What are the methods for instructing myriads of programmable entities to cooperate to achieve particular goals?
This is a research seminar intended to develop projects and ideas about engineering principles and languages that can be used to observe, control, organize, and exploit the behavior of programmable multitudes.
Students will be expected to report on research literature and to prepare a paper in this area.
Enrollment will be limited. Permission of instructors is required.
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Created: May 15, 1997
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Modified: Oct 13, 1997|
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