Copyright and Patents [3]
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
10 July 2001
In describing the software we publish from this Web site we use terms
like "state of the art" and "obvious". The following references are intended
to help place our software within the broad sweep of 3D computing and help
flesh out the meaning of these terms:
AMIGAMAGIC oBLITTERator [1987] [http://www.owonder.com/amigamagic]
- and -
[13 May 2002 update start]
In 1993 the film Jurassic Park showed off the Silicon Graphics FSN (pronounced "fusion")
3D file system navigator for their IRIX operating system, which presents an interactive
navigable 3D view of your computer resources.
The film is reviewed by James Berardinelli at
http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/j/jurassic.html.
FSN in the film is described at
and SGI present FSN at
.
[13 May 2002 update end]
With the release of ROOMS build 401 we need to add to the abstract description of
our software which was started above [see September 2000].
As with the publication of September 2000 [see above] what follows is
merely a defensive statement.
On EVAC:
Entities recognised by the product may be agents, capable of originating
actions or commands or instructions or be sources of data, and in all
or any of these ways act as agents in response to conditions which are
preset or conditions which develop (change)
over time or conditions which are entirely new and have to be dealt with
in an unprescribed or novel way. Such agents may act on objects within or
accessd via the product. Entities may or may not be part of the product or
of a particular instance of the product. Entities or the ability to create
entities or enhance entity capability may be components which may optionally
be incorporated into the product or optionally work in conjunction with the product.
The entities may modify their own behaviour according to conditions (states,
commands, instructions or data) external or internal to themselves or in
conjunction with other agents. Other agents need not be of the same kind
(e.g. could be a user or an EVAC-bearing object or other, needing only
to be able to effect minimal communication with the entity (e.g. a bit
sent or received)). Modified behaviour may be learned
or be novel and patterns of behaviour may may be sent to and received
from external storage or other entities.
The entities may regulate the behaviour of visual objects or data objects
or instruction-bearing objects or structural(systemic) objects or the properties
of a location which other entities may at some time occupy or may
inform the behaviour of other agents (like a user or an EVAC-bearing object
or other entity, needing only to be able to effect minimal communication).
The entities may moderate the behaviour of visual objects or data objects
or instruction-bearing objects and act to adjust, correct, reduce, enhance,
accelerate, enable or disable other object behaviour. Such moderation may accomplish
the naturalistic performance of a task (as in realistic simulation)
or the necessary and safe regulation of a task (like moderation of
an instruction to destroy named other resources with inappropriate
wild-card naming).
The entities may take over control directly or indirectly and partially or entirely
for some or all of a task or time span of the behaviour of another
entity (the other entity may or may not be of a similar type) either as a
more approriate instrument for
performing (or instructing or providing data) the task or as a contribution to the
behaviour of a system (of entities or of minimally communicating
components of a system) or whether by necessity the entity
can only act through a proxy due to its otherwise limited range of effective
action or influence.
Entities may be virtual in so far as they have no fixed operational
location, rather they are said to be located or operating wherever they
derive the majority of their processing power (which may be best viewed
or understood as substantially in software (e.g. if running on a virtual machine)
or substantially hardware (e.g. if directly executing machine instructions)).
The location may change or be distributed in response to available resources
or most suitable
resources or proximity to resources required for effective entity behaviour.
One mechanism for achieving virtual entities is product support for
entity shell creation and facilitating shell loading and unloading as in the
transmission and modification of patterns of behaviour. A shell may be
for example an inactive or behaviourless entity (e.g. the product responds
to a request to create (or supply) a shell and the shell is given a load
behaviour instruction
and once loaded, virtual entity activity is effectively moved to the
environment of the product which supplied the new shell).
|
