Section: Scientific Foundations
Unconventional/Nature-inspired Programming
Facing the complexity of the emerging ICT landscape in which highly heterogeneous digital services evolve and interact in numerous different ways in an autonomous fashion, there is a strong need for rethinking programming models. The question is “what programming paradigm can efficiently and naturally express this great number of interactions arising concurrently on the platform?.
It has been suggested [47] that observing nature could be of great interest to tackle the problem of modeling and programming complex computing platforms, and overcome the limits of traditional programming models. Innovating unconventional programming paradigms are requested to provide a high-level view of these interactions, then allowing to clearly separate what is a matter of expression from what is a question of implementation. Towards this, nature is of high inspiration, providing examples of self-organising, fully decentralized coordination of complex and large scale systems.
As an example, chemical computing [50] has been proposed more than twenty years ago for a natural way to program parallelism. Even after significant spread of this approach, it appears today that chemical computing exposes a lot of good properties (implicit autonomy, decentralization, and parallelism) to be leveraged for programming service infrastructures.
The Myriads team will investigate nature-inspired programming such as chemical computing for autonomous service computing.