Cellular Objects for Cellular Computers

Innovative Applications of Massive Parallelism

Volume

Papers from the 1993 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Cellular automata have inherent object orientation characteristics but they are too fine-grain and too rigid to serve as a distributed process-based modelling formalism and, consequently, as a software development paradigm. A higher level, well-structured and more flexible model is required to act as a basis for active data structures. To take advantage of the developments in objectorientation, we need to develop "light" active objects as an intermediate option between distributed intelligent agents (or active objects) of the type of ACTORS (or even coarser-grain) and dimensional n-bit CA which will be able to execute in relative simple processing elements communicating in a very simple way. In response to these needs we have developed cellular objects which are briefly presented in this paper.