Space, Time and Multi-time

we move now to the world of asynchronous ensembles. we’ve discussed information machines. Now imagine a lot of them zipping around separately, each piloted by its own Actor—communicating occasionally, getting born and self-destructing spontaneously—all converging like a swarm of space-scooters or electronic piranhas on some lurking huge problem in the near distance. Now this is computing! A group of objects that interact; a group, accordingly, that is more than the sum of its parts. If you assemble a hundred toasters side-by-side and turn each one loose on a slice of bread, what you’ve got is a hundred toasters, toasting their hearts out. If you assemble a hundred monkeys side by side, what you’ve got is not merely a hundred monkeys. You have a monkey community of some kind, an ensemble and not simply one hundred separate parts. Toasters don’t interact, but monkeys do. One hundred information machines working on the same problem also form an ensemble, an entity that is more, in some sense, than the sum of its parts. Like monkeys, these information machines interact. They must communicate and coordinate with each other in order to make progress as a group on the same problem. An ensemble is asynchronous if each part is independent, ticking along at its own pace. In the ensembles we’re talking about, each information machine is encased in its own little piece of spacetime. The machines are unsynchronized: No machine can predict exactly what any other machine is doing at any given time, because each Actor runs his own show, executes his own script. Nothing outside the machine beats time or constrains the Actor in any way: He barrels along at his own speed. Asynchronous ensembles (ensembles for short) are a major topic for software in general. They are the crucial Mirror world technology. Mirror worlds would be unthinkable without them. But here’s another interesting thing about ensembles: They are also the “crucial technology” of nature and mankind. That’s a biggish statement. But a bit of thought makes it clear that physical, chemical, biological and sociological systems are virtually all asynchronous ensembles of one kind or another.