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Actors for CyberThings

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Abstract:
Actors are becoming ever more important because of our increasing dependence on the following:

* coherent many-core (soon to be every-word-tagged) architectures, for which Actor concurrency is ideally suited.
* the Internet of Things, for which Actors are helpful in standardization.

In carrying out the above work, it is helpful to distinguish between the following:

* The Actor Model (which can be used to directly model all physically possible computation) is being increasingly used in industrial products, e.g., eBay, Microsoft, Twitter, etc.
* ActorScript (which is a particular very efficient and powerful programming system for implementing Actors) can be used to guide practical implementations in currently available programming environments, e.g., Erlang, Elixir, Java, C++, C#, JavaScript, Scala, etc.

Specific examples are discussed of how to use ActorScript and the Actor Model for engineering large-scale information systems in datacenters and for the Internet of Things. In particular, Actors can help avoid many pitfalls and problems that are commonly encountered.

Technical and engineering aspects of Actors for CyberThings even bear on possible resolutions of the current FBI/NSA proposal for mandatory backdoors in the Internet of Things.

Please see the following background reading:

* Articles on the following: the Actor Model, ActorScript, and Inconsistency Robustness
* How installing backdoors in the Internet of Things assists cyberterrorists

By Hewitt at 2015-04-06 04:56 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 3856 reads

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ActorScript implemented?

Is ActorScript implemented? Is there a compiler/interpreter/checker for extant OSs?

By raould at Mon, 2015-04-06 17:38 | login or register to post comments

Implementation of ActorScript is not publicly available

Unfortunately, an implementation of ActorScript is not publicly available at this time.

Furthermore, the version of the article at:

ActorScript

is somewhat obsolete and is not the published version in the book. The published version of the article has a meta-circular interpreter for ActorScript.

Since the book is not published in electronic form, the only way to obtain an electronic version of the article is to persuade arXiv to allow it to be deposited. So far, arXiv has not responded to requests to allow the article to be deposited.

Fortunately, the book publisher has generously allowed authors to retain individual copyrights to the their articles. Consequently, it is legal to deposit the article in arXiv.

Of course, you should still buy the book to get the following:
* 70+ page preface/overview of the book
* all the other good articles
* a comprehensive index of all of the articles

Cheers,
Carl

By Hewitt at Mon, 2015-04-06 19:15 | login or register to post comments

Electronic copies of published versions

It will be necessary to persuade arXiv to allow posting of the final published versions of articles that already have preprint drafts posted on arXiv.

You can contact them at help@arxiv.org mentioning the article number whose published version you would like to see posted on arXiv.

Otherwise, only paper versions will be available in the book "Inconsistency Robustness" published by College Publications.

By Hewitt at Thu, 2015-04-09 14:57 | login or register to post comments