The ASS, the Absolutely simplified system of Chris Swart (indexed at: http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive-1996/0341.html, note that the thing.desk.nl URL is dead, and the last part of the article seems to be missing) is something that grabs the imagination. Mine at least. It does two things. The bit of me that went to uni and still does, the bit that puts things in boxes, even if it has to spend time making those boxes and defining the edges and bottom and top and how to get inside those boxes, well, that bit of my brain says, "cute, cellular automata." Then it stops talking, because it has a compartment labelled ASS and it's inside a slightly larger compartment called CA, and in that compartment there are many other things which fall under the title and are much more "scientific."
But that's not what this text is about. Maybe for people who have never played around with Conway's "Game of Life," this text might lead them off there, and that would not be a bad thing. But if that's all it was, then no. There are many people the world over who talk about CA type of ideas, who chat about biological metaphors for computation, evolving strategies for cooporation or tax avoidance or share-market winnings or something else. No, Chris' text does something else.
Wondering about the whys and wherefores of computer hardware, somehow he ends up at the CA model of computation. Not like tech-heads or physics graduates, the arrival at CA follows a natural course towards minimalism. Maybe I'm overly sympathetic because I've been dealing with hardware installations and compatibilities recently.
So for me the issue that is hit upon here is this whole appropriate tech thing. Geo here is working on biological computer stuff, the expression "micro-hertz" gets bandied about. I'm not sure if it is the right speed for any particular processing job to get done, but it might well be. But there's this idea that certain forms of technology are simply inappropriate for the job at hand. Hammer as a fly swat. Moreover, the organisation of usage of those tools can be overwhelming in terms of the content that they carry implicitly. It is no coincidence that clockwork models of conciousness raged through the renaissance only to be replaced with computational metaphors once the computer became our main intellectual partner.
Perhaps the nicest aspect of the ASS proposal is the idea that computational
power is evenly spread through the computer. There is no part that is the
CPU, another part that is the memory. The name CPU, "Central Processing
Unit" captures all the control-freak centralised power that any X-ocrat
could want. There is a concept introduced by Tom Toffoli of computation
equivalence between various computational substrates. The idea is that
you should be able to obtain computational power in units that are equally
powerful. That computation is, to use a strange term, "fungible" (see http://pm.bu.edu/tt/publ/fung.ps).
That is, units of computation are completely exchangable and summable.
For a small job you need just a little computation, for larger jobs you
go out and borrow or rent a box-full, to render and animation you need
to borrow a truck to transport the stuff.
This model, abstract as it might be, appeals to me due to its locality
and friendliness. I can imagine popping next door to borrow a cup of sugar
and a kilo of computer.
If computational power were really perfectly fungible, then the process of group computation becomes something else. A large group of people coming together has computational power that no single person is likely to be able to afford. Computers stop being these things that drag our eyes into this private space, where try as they might, only the pair of eyes attached to the hand on the mouse are really interested in what's going on (the hassle of surfing over someone else's shoulder is too much). We start having computation that is fungible, like a meal that is good in bits, some noodles, perhaps a salad, becoming a delicious buffet when combined with the dinners of friends for a large shared meal.
Somehow the title of the text from Chris, "nettime: our own computer hardware" captures it.Something like this could be "our" computer hardware, it has all the right buttons. Just one question, how do I get Eudora running on it?
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Tim Boykett
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