An Object-Oriented Simulator for the Apiary

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 3

Support Hardware and Software

This paper describes a simulator for the proposed Apiary, an object-oriented, message passing parallel machine for artificial intelligence applications, using the QCKV model of computation. The simulator implements an interpreter for the lowest level "virtual machine language" of the Apiary, specifying computations in terms of creating objects and sending messages rather than loading and storing registers. The simulator is itself programmed in the object-oriented style advocated by the actor philosophy, allowing experimentation with alternative implementation mechanisms without disturbing the behavior of the simulation. Technical details in the paper assume some familiarity with object-oriented programming and the actor formalism.