What is Creature Labs' CyberLife?

Building machines in cyberspace

"Cyberspace" could be defined as "the location at which two people meet when they are engaged in a telephone conversation." This definition expands to encompass all networked communication quite easily, and the concept of the internet as a 'container' of cyberspace, or a channel 'into' cyberspace is now commonly understood throughout the world. Since the emergence of the notion of "virtual reality," cyberspace has become a broader and more powerful concept, representing a world 'inside' a computer, and people are now beginning to be able to walk around cyberspace, see it, manipulate it, meet people in it, and shoot them.

The idea that a computer is a container and life-support system for cyberspace has begun to have profound implications for programming methodology. Originally, computers were designed to be fast calculating machines (hence the name), and were even used to compute such abstract operations as Calculus, despite that fact that Newton (and Leibniz) only invented the Calculus because they didn't have computers to iterate their approximations for them! Once computing got into its stride, however, the notion of 'Procedural Computation' took hold, and computers became machines for expressing algorithms, rather than merely solving equations.

Now, expressions describe relationships and algorithms describe processes, and both of these tools very quickly became used to make computer models of real-life systems, for example to forecast the weather or compute the behaviour of bridges in a wind. The expressions and the algorithms in such models directly describe the behaviour of those things (air masses or bridges); they don't necessarily, however, describe the things themselves. The recent adoption of Object-Oriented Programming turns that view around, and considers a computer to be a device for modelling things, each of which has certain properties, and it is the relationship between those properties which then describe the behaviour of the system. The modern programming paradigm is therefore one in which the programmer constructs objects, which reside in the cyberspace within a computer: A computer is a machine which contains cyberspace, which contains machines.

Object-orientation is rapidly becoming popular, at least partly because certain advantages such as portability, reusability and robustness come along with it. However, old habits die hard, and many programmers who lap up these undoubtedly valuable side-effects still fail to appreciate the profundity of the concept of a computer as a machine which contains cyberspace which contains machines. Yet profound it certainly is.