[cells-devel] A shocking proposal

[Kenny Tilton]

jan wrote:

>Kenny Tilton <ktilton at nyc.rr.com> writes:
>
>  
>
>>That will be a lot more fun than text-based tutorials like
>>01-cell-basics.lisp. Oh, speaking of which, did you all also find
>>Bill Clementson's Cells write-up?:
>>
>>http://home.comcast.net/~bc19191/2003_09_07_bill-clementson_archive.html
>>    
>>
>
>I think the sample run could have been better designed, it would have
>been more clear if the temperature dropped enough to turn the motor
>back on.
>
Oh, I did not notice that--Bill actually cloned one of my examples, so I 
just perused it.

You are right, it is important to show that once the sensitivity is 
exceeded the synapse lets the message through. And in case you are 
wondering, this is not a frog in the frying pan situation (allegedly 
frogs only can sense a delta, so if you increase the heat slowly it will 
not notice and come to grief); the synapse keeps track of the last time 
it let a signal thru, and each time the sensitivity check is not between 
the immediately prior value and the current value, but between the 
current value and the last time the synapse let a change thru.

uh, I hasten to add that that is how fSensitivity works in particular. 
One could just as easily code up an fFrog synapse which ignored the 
cumulative change and worried only about jumps between two concecutive 
readings. These things are wholly user programmable. They have to answer 
two questions:

1. Given this new value of a particular cell used in a calculation, 
should the using cell be recalculated?

2. Given this new value, what value should be returned when the using 
cell re-samples the changed cell?

kenny

ps. excellent start on the use case today, with all sorts of good stuff 
going into it. I am branching lefty and right, touching on a lot of 
considerations. I am not one for reading doc, but if you sit down with 
this and make sure you follow it, I think a pretty deep understanding of 
Cells will follow. It is probably too much for a tutorial approach, but 
I sense the early-adopters on board right now are more pissed off by 
than appreciative of hand-holding. So I am really not holding back in 
this particular write-up, though I am trying to spell everything out so 
that there are no gaps.

kt

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