course, this approach smacks of the technology test that we observed in the Star Trek: First Contact movie. In any case, when the central character of the movie returns from her journey through the conveyance device, it is found that no record of what transpired was retained. In essence, it then becomes a question of faith as to whether the contact actually occurred. “It has always been done this way” was the message from the alien race.

So, we see a variety of visualizations of how interactions might occur within an environment where everyone is not on the same page with respect to how interactions should occur. We can summarize these visualizations by noting that when this situation occurs, the possibilities are either to get everyone to the same page or to revert back to the page that we are all born with; the physical ecosystem. For earthly species, when we revert to the physical ecosystem we essentially view the interaction as proceeding from a face-to-face encounter. Without putting a vertebrate guise on the illustration, with off-world aliens we would have to assume a “face-to-something” posture.

Our perspective is that, as least at it pertains to people and to computers, there are some preferable ways. We observe that interactions among computers are virtually a direct analogue to interactions among people, or even groups of people for that matter. The primary distinction arises from the fact that both the physical as well as social infrastructures within which computers and computer systems operate are based on a variety of mechanisms not available to exclusively human interactions. One might think of it as a case where computers have a different set of physical senses that connect them to their environment, which includes both people as well as other computers. To provide a way to support complex interactions, we suggest that the approach taken is to define a comprehensive policy infrastructure.

Now, before we continue, we must make slight amends for our selection of movie examples. In homage to probably the greatest movie of this genre, we must make note of Stanley Kubrick’s movie rendition of Arthur Clarke’s story, 2001 – A Space Odyssey. This movie is simply too broad in scope to use in illustrating the more mundane point that we wanted to make. Clarke’s masterpiece is itself a foundational telling of the story of human evolution. It is an epic, mythic tale such as we will later observe formed a critical phase of human evolutionary progression. From our perspective, mythic comprehension forms a seminal facility in the formulation of religion. Thus, we suggest that 2001 – A Space Odyssey is better studied as religious allegory as opposed to simply illustrating concepts of communication protocols.

Computer Interactions

Interactions among computer systems exhibit all of the characteristics of person to person physical interactions, with the additional dimensions of expanded scope in both physical proximity and temporal extension. Thus, interactions can take place at varying distances between the involved computers and they can take place over an extended period of time as opposed to a more tightly constrained interval that is typical for most purely physical interactions that involve people. The first concept on which the computer interaction model is based is that of a protocol. As we have noted previously, a protocol is a well-defined sequence of actions that are entered into as a way for two or more parties to arrive at a mutually agreed upon state. A protocol is involved in virtually any interaction, whether between people, between computers or between people and computers. Quite obviously, there can be effective protocols and ineffective protocols; protocols that solve problems and protocols that cause problems. We’ll try to stick to protocols that have been found effective in addressing real-world problems.

Book available at Midori Press (regular)
Book available at Midori Press (signed)
Book available at Amazon (regular)