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Computers and the Mechanics of Communication

Outline of a Vision from the Work of Petri and Holt

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Evolving Computability (CiE 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9136))

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Abstract

Computers have become an integral part of a vast range of coordination patterns among human activities which go far beyond mere calculation. The conceptual relevance of this new field of application of computers has been advocated by Carl Adam Petri (1926–2010) and Anatol W. Holt (1927–2010), two computer scientists best known for their contributions to the subject of Petri nets, a graphical formalism for describing the causal dependence of events in systems distributed in space. We outline some fundamental, mainly epistemological aspects of their vision of the computer as a “communication machine.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a biography of Petri, see the recent book by Einar Smith [34].

  2. 2.

    Extensive documentation on this work is now available at the page of the Defense Technical Information Center, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/index.html, search for example for the strings “AD0704796”, “ADA955303”, “ADA047864”.

  3. 3.

    Both Holt’s Nachlass, that we are currently studying, and that of Petri, are preserved at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

  4. 4.

    Holt’s mother, Claire Holt, collaborated with Bateson and his wife, Margaret Mead, as an expert of Indonesian art, especially of Balinese dance, see [2] for a biography.

  5. 5.

    This happened in at least one important context, the Wenner-Gren Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation held in Burg Wartenstein (Austria) in 1968, as evidenced by the proceedings edited by Bateson’s daughter, Mary Catherine [1]. Holt was one of the main characters of that conference which included as participants Gregory Bateson, Barry Commoner, Warren McCulloch and Gordon Pask, among others.

  6. 6.

    In this novel approach to the characterization of data structures we can see perhaps a first hint of techniques for data abstraction that would become a leading theme of programming language design in the next decade, culminating with the notion of (software) object.

  7. 7.

    It is formal because its rules are entirely formulated in terms of roles, and it is a pragmatics in the etymological sense, because it concerns communication among actors as action performers. Pragmatics has an obvious bearing on the communication-oriented uses of information technology, and in fact we find ideas from the speech-act theories of Austin, Searle and Habermas at the basis of the ‘language/action perspective’ of Winograd and Flores and the related coordination programs, and also in the foundational work on information systems by the Scandinavian school of Langefors, Goldkuhl and Lyytinen, among others.

  8. 8.

    In passing, we remark that closely related topologies have recently been exploited in the definition of the digital line for the purposes of digital image processing [23].

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Anastasia Pagnoni for encouragement, and help with Holt’s Nachlass, and to Marco Benini for his interest in this work. The financial support of Project LINTEL is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Turin, Italy

    Felice Cardone

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  1. Felice Cardone
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Correspondence to Felice Cardone .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Swansea University, Swansea, United Kingdom

    Arnold Beckmann

  2. University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Victor Mitrana

  3. Sofia University, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Mariya Soskova

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Cardone, F. (2015). Computers and the Mechanics of Communication. In: Beckmann, A., Mitrana, V., Soskova, M. (eds) Evolving Computability. CiE 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9136. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20028-6_1

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