The Art of the Propagator (2009) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Art of the Propagator (2009) [pdf]

dspace.mit.edu

54 pointskylerpalmer11 comments

This is also intimately connected with Ed Kmett's Guanxi project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7rlJWc3474 https://github.com/ekmett/guanxi

My understanding is he is using ideas from propagators and other places to make a performant logic programming framework in Haskell.

The section in SICP on circuit simulation has some similar ideas. I like to think that that was an early version of the propagator idea - https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...

The constraint language described in SICP (AFAIK began as a paper by Gerry Sussman and Richard Stallman, continued in the PhD thesis of Guy Steele) is indeed an inspiration / precursor to Alexey's dissertation on propagators.

Yes, and with Alexey's work (if I've understood it) the propagators are allowed to hold multiple values(beliefs) based on more than one (possibly conflicting) set of constraints.

I won't be able to read the paper, but from the abstract it sounds a bit like a blackboard[0]

"a common knowledge base, the "blackboard", is iteratively updated by a diverse group of specialist knowledge sources, starting with a problem specification and ending with a solution. Each knowledge source updates the blackboard with a partial solution when its internal constraints match the blackboard state. In this way, the specialists work together to solve the problem"

I can't see the term Blackboard used in the paper. Probably irrelevant but just an observation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_system

There is also miniadapton https://github.com/fisherdj/miniAdapton

Unlike what is explained OP, the computation is one way.

Cool. Found the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.05337.pdf

Nice! I’ve been spending a lot of time with Radul’s thesis, which is also on propagator networks, trying to follow along and implement a reactive framework using its teachings. Fun times

Nice! I just found out about it today. Is your project open-source?

Edit: found Radul's thesis: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/54635/6035432...

is Sussman still fond of this ? he was talking about it in meetups IIRC

I've only just heard of it from a talk he gave a few years back [1]. Not sure whether he's continued working with it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSU

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