[starlogo-users] patch and global variables...

[Kent Paul Dolan]

 "Ken Kahn" <toontalk at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Patches are too special purpose to be part of a language.

That would be a rather large surprise to the
software devotees of cellular automata, constructive
solid geometry modeling, and certain flavors of
genetic algorithms, all of which base themselves on
a regular grid of unmovable elements-with-attributes
which typically for the first and last disciplines
communicate only with nearest neighbor cells or
voxels.

Such "computing with a grid of patches" is so
important that several reductions of it to hardware
implementations have been done over time.

von Neumann proved in theory, and others since have
reduced his proof to practice, that a cellular
automaton "patch grid" can have a universal computer
built atop it. Thus, there is in concept no
programming problem that a patch grid will not
suffice to solve. It is "agents" that are the
additional complexity in the computational model,
not patches.

FWIW

xanthian.