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2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Computers and the Mechanics of Communication

Outline of a Vision from the Work of Petri and Holt

Author : Felice Cardone

Published in: Evolving Computability

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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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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Footnotes
1
For a biography of Petri, see the recent book by Einar Smith [34].
 
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
Both Holt’s Nachlass, that we are currently studying, and that of Petri, are preserved at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
 
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
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
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
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
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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Bateson, M.C.: Our Own Metaphor. A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (1972)
2.
Burton, D.: Sitting at the Feet of Gurus: The Life and Dance Ethnography of Claire Holt. Xlibris Corporation, Web Mounted (2009)
3.
Grimes, J.D., Holt, A.W., Ramsey, H.R.: Coordination system technology as the basis for a programming environment. Electr. Commun. 57(4), 301–314 (1983)
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Holt, A.W.: The personification of computers. Datamation 13(3), 137–138 (1967)
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Holt, A.W.: Information system theory project: final report. Technical report, RADC-TR-68-305, NTIS AD 676972, Applied Data Research, Inc., Princeton, NJ, September 1968
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12.
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Holt, A.W., Commoner, F.: Events and conditions. In: Dennis, J.B. (ed.) Record of the Project MAC conference on concurrent systems and parallel computation, pp. 3–52. ACM, New York (1970)
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Khalimsky, E., Kopperman, R., Meyer, P.: Computer graphics and connected topologies on finite ordered sets. Topology Appl. 36, 1–17 (1990)MATHMathSciNetCrossRef
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26.
Petri, C.A.: Kommunikation mit Automaten. Ph.D. thesis, Darmstadt Technical University (1962), English Translation as Technical report RADC-TR-65-377, vol. 1, Supplement 1, Griffiss Air Force Base (1966)
27.
Petri, C.A.: Concepts of net theory. In: Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science: Proceedings of Symposium and Summer School, 3–8 September, pp. 137–146. Mathematical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Strbské Pleso (1973)
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Petri, C.A.: Modelling as a communication discipline. In: Beilner, H., Gelenbe, E. (eds.) Measuring, Modelling and Evaluating Computer Systems. North-Holland, Amsterdam (1977)
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Petri, C.A., Smith, E.: Concurrency and continuity. In: Rozenberg, G. (ed.) Advances in Petri Nets. LNCS, vol. 266, pp. 273–292. Springer, Berlin (1987)
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Metadata
Title
Computers and the Mechanics of Communication
Author
Felice Cardone
Copyright Year
2015
Book
Evolving Computability

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-20027-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-20028-6

Copyright Year: 2015

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20028-6_1

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