Monday, December 16, 2013

Response to an Unexpected Email about Clique Space(TM).

Here's a copy of everything but the first two and final paragraphs of an email response I gave to an unexpected email I received this morning:

  • Clique Space is still a concept without a proof, it is currently a Java SE subversion managed code base. I started development in about July 2008, and anticipated (guessed) that two years should be long enough to prove the ideas. So, although I didn't anticipate the proof to take as long as it has, what has kept me going is a steady increase in my confidence when I see solutions evolve around implementation details that underscore the primacy of the underlying data [model].

    I believe that at the moment, I am currently in greatest need of two things: funding for coders and intellectual property protections.

    I have absolutely no money. While that doesn't stop me proving my concept, progress is awfully slow. Alone, I can't offer any payment for the efforts of another person to help on the proof, but I might be able to offer an equity stake so that should the concept actually work, any individual who helped in the development would likewise share in any earnings. If I was offering this equity stake to an individual or a small organisation, I would anticipate this stake to be very small. While I currently own 100% of Clique Space, I would anticipate my direct stake in Clique Space to ultimately be very small if the concept attracts the right attention.

    My stake in the IP, currently at 100%, is also negotiable. I would hope that the implementation might become subject to an OSS licence, and that a self-sustaining community would form to support the subsequent evolution of a proven concept.

    You have probably come to me because you have read my blog, and noticed that while perhaps, I have a great idea, I'm not great at promoting it. I would certainly appreciate help here. As a general rule, I am not one who is given to a jet set life of international hobnobbing; I kind of like my life here in Wollongong.
 It gave me an opportunity to disclose more of my state of progress, so I have quoted it in this entry.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

11/12/13

In month/day/year, a nice date to record a possible milestone.

This day sees the establishment of a rough-hewn version of the observer Media Profile spine; that spine which allows Agent Devices to keep a record of which other Agent Devices know of a particular principle or fact.

The observer mechanism permits collaborating clusters of Agent Devices to send transmitters containing signals that alter the state of an observer Clique. Signal transmitters (transmitters that contain a signal indicating the change in state of a particular principle or the constitution of the principle's observer Clique) can include the addition and removal of observer Participants reflecting which Agent Devices know of a particular subject principle, as well as the addition and removal of facts which the subject contains.

Signal transmitters are propagated in waves through the physical Agent Device cluster (the Agent Collaboration) in accordance with the synaptic channels established between neighbouring Agent Devices. Questions entertaining the nature of this propagation are gaining prominence; every Agent Device within a Clique not only needs to be informed of a change in the Clique's state, but once informed, an Agent Device needs to "back-propagate" the fact that it has been informed to every other member of the principle's observer Clique. Back-propagation is a type of transmission because, like signal transmission, back-propagation must necessarily use the synapse mechanism as this mechanism provides the physical medium of transmission from one Agent Device to another.

Such a mechanism involving back-propagation would afford all agent devices the ability to be continually informed of the operational state of every other Agent Device participating in the observer Clique. Cliques can be reorganised if any participating Agent Device fails to back-propagate a signal.

I fear that I'll be informing the world of too much if I say any more at this point in time. Maybe, perhaps, I'm just weird, and this Clique Space (TM) thing is keeping me suitably distracted.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Maybe something else.

I'm still refraining from talk about the Clique Space(TM) technology, but that does not mean that I cannot ramble about other stuff in relation to Clique Space.

I'm an atheist. I'm an unbeliever; I'll go further and disclose that (unless provoked - I suppose) I'm a pacifist anti-theist. This is no big deal for me, I've not had to negotiate any threat of familial estrangement. My life has been fairly comfortable. I think that, unlike perhaps the US (where I hear most opposition to atheism originate) I have lived in a society where one's own childhood development has not been impeded by persuasive charm of charismatic individuals who might otherwise have been able to scare my immature mind into submissive intellectual corners.

I started my adventure with Clique Space almost a decade ago because, being someone who had been equipped by a childhood where he was relatively free to explore, I felt the common urge to answer what I think are fairly fundamental aspects of existence. These aspects (if there are indeed more than one; I haven't bothered to enumerate them beyond ramblings like the one I am writing here) revolve around such questions like: what is it about the human brain that produces a mind? If a mind can be manifest through a human brain, can it be manifest in something that isn't a human brain? Does the brain perhaps act like a magnifying glass; does it focus a natural property of the universe, and if it might, might that same property be focussed synthetically?

From these questions, I ask myself, what then is being magnified by a human brain? Surely, it has to be the ego: the individual who not only perceives their own existence, but also understands 1: the visceral necessity of defending one's existence against elements that would do the ego harm, and 2: the opportunity of advancement of one's existence through elements that would nourish and protect the ego. In addition to this, I think that it is crucial to recognise the existence of egos other than one's own. If this were not true, then there would be no need to delineate between that which is owned and that which is not owned; the ego would therefore become a redundant artefact, and there would be no evolutionary benefit in having one. In fact, to the point of the existence of other egos and in reference to the second paragraph of this blog entry, a community of theistic egos regularly appears to withhold access by one ego to others as a way of coercing that particular individual to adopt and hold the beliefs of the community. The options for theism's victims are: adherence to a dogma or non-existence, at least to those who you have previously relied on for validation of your existence - other members of the theistic tribe in which the non-believing victim confides.

I couldn't have come up with Clique Space if I were a theist; for if I were, I would have been tied to the notion that the individual is a sacred property for which mere mortals like me have no divine licence to dabble with. Like nearly all of the history of progress, a new technological paradigm can reveal powerful universal maxims that often challenge the boundaries of the theist's world view. I believe that something like Clique Space hasn't been attempted until now because the human species may not have yet felt comfortable approaching and incorporating notions that attempt to see the ego as a universal substance like light or gravity which obeys some collection of governing principles.

Now, turning the criticism onto the opinions of many sceptics and even atheistic ones at that, I have met a few people who profess to be non-believers, who would similarly deny the existence of a mind. I have received the impression that they would dismiss the self as a mere side-effect of neural activity; having nothing to contribute to the individual's existence. I put that this is clearly wrong: if the individual (the self, the ego, even perhaps the soul) did not exist, then the organism in which the individual is manifest would have no reason to defend itself against deleterious forces of this world or to advance itself by capitalising on positive forces. Similarly, an individual that does not recognise themselves, would be incapable of recognising this similar property manifest in the world around them, and would crash through this world to meet its end when it encroached too much upon the space claimed by others - who would of course be similarly ignorant; something I do not observe except in cases where an individual appeared to be mentally deranged in some way.

It appears that a lot about psychopathology is about individuals who have problems recognising the ego either in themselves or in others. Perhaps, if Clique Space is a mechanism that is capable of manifesting an ego, maybe then, a lot about psychopathology could be studied in a Clique Space system. If this were true, what ethical framework would be necessary to keep study of egos manifest by this system from the type of harm that one hominid ego would not subject to another? How could a Clique Space system be sufficiently complex so it could be put into a state which could produce similar symptoms to various psychopathologies, while being as certain as one can be that no ego, possibly manifest by this unstable Clique Space, is enduring the terror of this instability?

Monday, August 5, 2013

Going dormant.

My blog friends...

This will be my last message for a while.

After failing to find the funds to pay the retinue of patent attorneys for the filing of my US patent application, I feel that I will need to keep schtum and not disclose any more detail about the technology evolving around Clique Space. I do this in an attempt to protect my concept, and in the hope that I may be able to refile a future patent application that doesn't include any prior art.

I leave you with this question: in what type of a society must an individual exist when the products of an individual's initiative may be taken from the individual because they don't have enough money to protect these products?

This question effects every individual of this society; not only me.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Immersed in a world of morons.

I truly live in a society of idiots. A society says to a child "tell us what's on you mind", then, when a child grows up and finds that there is something in there, finds a society silenced by its own stupidity. No one wants to know what's going on.

I receive a reply by someone after I left an email list that calls itself "Personal Clouds". I left in disgust (I was actually thrown off, but these things coincided closely enough) at the fact that this list appears to be just as moronic as any gathering of morons can be. I sent the letter to ask for some feedback as to whether my revised paper on Clique Space(TM) was going to be published as part of a submission by some of these spotty morons. The letter reads as follows:
  • Owen,

    I'm sorry I didn't respond around the time you sent the paper.

    I read through it a bit, and felt it would work well as a white paper for SSRN and for the Clique Space website, to explain what you are doing.

    I didn't see any clear way to integrate what you were discussing into a more general paper on personal clouds, because it is so focused on your company.

    I hope that helps,
Well, yes it does. It helps me work out that there is no one capable of grasping any idea of any merit. It makes me think that humanity is very inefficient when it actually comes to understanding the contents of any idea; I'm no one special, but still, I get nothing when I try and wave an idea in people's faces for more than five years. The society talks about "innovation" and encouraging its people to be innovative... my story is why people just say "bugger off society you fools."

Funnily enough, my ideas are focussed on my ideas. My ideas appeared to me relevant to this Personal Clouds list because that's what a Sovereign Clique Space is. More to this, Clique Space provides a perfectly good mechanism to federate the Agent Devices in the Sovereign Clique Spaces of two or more individuals to create federated Clique Spaces which facilitate organisations of indeterminate size.

I have been convinced that everyone is screwed in the head.

I replied to this letter with this:
  • Thanks for the sincere reply.

    Evidently, the Personal Clouds list didn't catch on with my work. Perhaps I'll be remembered when what I believe will be inevitable actually happens, and people start thinking about how the self might be manifest in synthetic environments. Maybe there'll be some interest in what appears on SSRN.

    I'm off to sulk. I'm going to sit in my corner and surround myself with my code until I die. It's a much safer place than causing injury to my ego by trying get my point across to a society full of morons. Some of these morons will probably grow wealthy in the exploitation of Clique Space when the rest catch on. Too bad for me. Don't bother me if recognition is posthumous - I won't care. My ideas will be my property or no one's property.

    Go away now, and tell everyone not to bother me again.
Those who make hay out of an idea like Clique Space will (if I'm not one of them) be fraudulent morons who are bullshitting their way through life in a society of gullible morons.

This society, when one of its number try to present an idea to others, behaves as if one's ideas won't matter. Some in this society promote themselves as being the go-to people when one has ideas that address a certain problem, but even these people can't comprehend. Even when one appeals for help in testing their ideas, this society generally regards the individual with complete contempt. Conclusion: this society is completely full of morons. Morons, morons, everywhere!

You're probably an idiot. Stay away from me.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Role Based Access Control.

Here's a UML class diagram of the general Role Based Access Control mechanism. It is put together according to the one that can be found from a Wiki page on the subject.



Fair enough.

Here's the same diagram of the mechanism adapted with classes from the Clique Space(TM) data model.


The adapted RBAC data model does not use all the classes defined in the Clique Space data model. However, it can clearly be seen by me that those Clique Space classes that do match the function of the RBAC ones do so rather well.

There are obvious omissions (incompletenesses) in RBAC.

Firstly, RBAC has only one hierarchy. RBAC does not distinguish between 1. the functional compatibility of various different devices and 2. the responsibility assigned to different individual roles. RBAC has the equivalent of point 2 only; the Affiliation does the same thing as the User/Role Constraint association of the RBAC model.

Secondly, I can't work out what the Role Activation Constraint class is meant to be. There is no equivalent to this beast in the Clique Space data model.

Thirdly, it seems that the Session class in RBAC represents some application or login session with a server-based system. Hence, the best fit for this class in the Clique Space data model appears to be the Connection Element, even if the relationship of the Agent Device to the device represented by a Connection is not quite identical. The Connection is an association between a Sovereign and a Media Profile in the same way that the Affiliation associates a Sovereign and a Mode Profile. Hence, a Connection has a single Sovereign, and so the Sovereign end of the association between it and the Connection has had its multiplicity changed to 1.

Finally, the RBAC model has no formal method of recording consent. Consent should be seen as the most important component of a system that models the interaction of individuals. Consent happens when the interacting is taking place; it cannot be given before or after. Clique Space models consent in the structure of the Clique and its Participants. An unspecified log-file mechanism laid over an RBAC database is the best that RBAC can do.

It almost appears that the person or people who designed RBAC gave up hope that their model could represent the flexibility of the multitude of personal relationships. It looks like they only saw the role side of these relationships, and were blind to the compatibility side. It appears that they decided that the incompleteness they experienced with this lack of a good mechanism could be swept under the metaphorical carpet by their Role Activation Constraint class.

I hope Clique Space will show these individuals the error of their ways. In time, I hope Clique Space will demonstrate a superior solution to the same problem domain as RBAC. Without an implementation, one can only hope. Still, hope is what drives me to this implementation.

Monday, July 15, 2013

The three spines.

This diagram provides justification for why there are seven Elements in Clique Space(TM). The first diagram of this blog.



So, what does it say?

In Clique Space, there are seven Elements. These Elements are represented in the diagram above by the blue hexagonal Chips. There are three spines. The diagram shows the Participant at the centre of the diagram; the Participant is the Element that is common to all three spines. Each spine is labelled by the Element named in the outermost Chip. Therefore, starting at the top, and going clockwise, we have: the Sovereign spine, the Mode Profile spine, and the Media Profile spine.

The diagram discloses that in order to create an Identity, one must have a Sovereign. As the only Sovereign that one has access to is one's own, the only Sovereign one can use to create Identities is one's own. In order to create an Affiliation, one must have a Mode Profile and an Identity. In order to create a Connection, one must have a Media Profile and an Identity. One does not necessarily need to use one's own Identity to create a Connection or Affiliation.

As the paragraph above establishes, the red arrows in the diagram indicate which Elements of a particular type one needs in order to create the Element to which the arrows point. There are two red arrows from the Connection to the Participant and this is meant to imply that one needs to have one or more Connections to create a Participant. One also needs an Identity to create a Participant. However, the two yellow arrows with a dashed tail indicate that one needs zero or more characteristics (properties) which may be sourced from one or more Affiliations or the given Affiliations' Media Profile hierarchies.

Properties are settings which are paired with the corresponding Enabling Constraint given in the Clique's medium (derived from a subset of the flattened Media Profile hierarchies of the given Connections) and for each Enabling Constraint:Property pair, creates a Limiting Constraint. These Limiting Constraints are stored in the Participant. Properties may also be sourced from any Element so therefore, needn't come from any of the given Identity's Affiliations or any of the Mode Profiles associated with these Affiliations.

Basically, that's the justification for why Clique Space has seven Elements. I hope this helps others understand Clique Space.

There are a few subtle things that this diagram doesn't make obvious.

For instance, because a Participant expresses a collection of Connections, only characteristics associated with those Connections may be also be candidate properties for expression in the Participant. Additionally, because a subset of the flattened Media Profile hierarchy's Enabling Constraints are selected to be expressed in the Participant, only those Media Profiles from which Enabling Constraints have been selected can supply candidate properties. I also think that those candidate properties must be related to a specific Enabling Constraint contained in that particular Media Profile, but perhaps that's taking things a little too far.

Another relationship this diagram doesn't make obvious is that one may use any Identity to create a Participant. However, this Identity and the Identity of all the Connections must be the same. If a property has been selected from an Affiliation or a Mode Profile, the Identity of any Affiliation acting as the source must match the Identity given to the Participant. Any property sourced from a Mode Profile must be sourced from a Mode Profile that has been associated to one the Affiliations of the given Identity.

In 2004, I could see the seven Elements, but couldn't fully appreciate the relationship down to the level which I have described here. Maybe much of the relationship is now prior art. But still, if those Elements were removed, there's not much left to invent with, and I think the relationship was a product of the concept's development, and not necessarily an inventive step.

Oh, and yes... how does one create the outermost Elements? There are things that are too complicated to explain even as text following the diagram. I know what they are, but it'll be good just to leave them for another blog entry. At least, I can quickly say that the same mechanism being left out is used to create all the Elements; it just isn't mentioned in this entry because it would steer the reader too far from the purpose of this entry.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

A small epiphany today: the candidate as a key.

I've just resumed my 6k jogs after nearly two weeks of less than great weather. Just before I went on today's stint, I had a small epiphany that has since spread its tendrils of enlightenment over the whole concept, revealing perhaps many answers to problems that hitherto remained without an answer.

The epiphany happened like this: I was getting ready to go out for my jog, and I was just trying to capture my thoughts as comments in the AdministratorClientMediaProfile class. I'm working on the connect method of this class; a remote method call from an administrator client when someone attempts to connect one to an Agent Device member of their Sovereign's Clique Space.

It was intended that the candidate data structure be used to communicate two things: a collection of named enabling constraints and a collection of properties. These candidates would come in two subtypes: the Owner's candidate would indicate such properties as would be expressed in an Owner Participant, and the member's candidate would indicate such properties as would be expressed in a member Participant. The current placement of this candidate as a structure which can be used in a remote call has fallen out of favour. The candidate as it is currently implemented appears inappropriate.

I made some wistful half-formed remarks about declaring candidate "templates" as a property of an Identity and left for my jog. As I walked out my door, a small frisson buzzed me. I thought to myself that it would just be better to think of the candidate as a named object which contains Enabling Constraints and the location, within the Identities scope, of properties which would fit into parameters of these Enabling Constraints to yield a Participant's Limiting Constraints.

While I was jogging, I did some more thinking. When I got back, I re-edited my comments and what I put down earlier evolved into what has been re-quoted here:
  • Consider moving the concept of the candidate into more of a central role as an internal property of an Identity. This may be a good way to establish connection semantics for all external devices. A candidate might then need only be referred to by its name when a connection is requested through an external device.
The candidate has taken a new, and hopefully a simpler position within the implementation. The candidate is a key that is used to instruct an external device to connect to a Clique Space. Entries in the Identity's internal candidates property can be referred to by name when a device is being used to request its connection to a Clique Space. Hence, to reference a candidate held in an Identity, all that needs to be communicated from the device is a candidate's name. Usage of a named candidate in this way appears to be precisely how a user would prefer to determine the way an external device might initiate a connection with the user's sovereign Clique Space so the device can then be engaged with other devices through Clique Space.

Structurally, the candidate completely specifies the set of Media Profiles that determine the Participant's medium. The candidate key, on the other hand, only draws specific mode entries form the Mode Profile spine, so that when the Participant is being formed, additional Properties can be taken from wherever they reside in the Connections and the Connections' Media Profiles.

At the moment, I still think that there will be times where a named candidate will not provide a flexible option when engaging a device once it is connected to a Clique Space. There will be plenty of times where it still appears necessary to be able to create a candidate for a single use; especially in a situation where an individual needs to be flexible, and admit a form of compromise so the Clique can form and some process governed by this Clique can ensue.

Currently, I still think it good to turn this paradigm shift over in my head for a little while yet to see if I can work out if any anomaly renders it unsuitable before I move to implement.

Sunday, June 30, 2013

In my journey.

My journey, in the context of this blog entry, is the set of events and an interval of time that have led me to this point in my development of my Clique Space(TM) thing.

In my journey, I have been witness to a changing code base. In my journey, my code base has both grown and shrunk as realisations have born the creation and growth of new structures as well as the atrophy and destruction of structures rendered redundant. In my journey, I have seen my code base changes flow and boil in consequence to the effect of my intellectual endeavours to construct a system that is faithful to the purpose which I conceived in 2004.

In my journey, I have witnessed the following: my code base accrues the software equivalent of carbuncles and stretch marks that one would observe in any part of one's body subject to the stress of general use. My code base has accrued its own set of idiosyncrasies that one might observe of a car or a house over an extended period of time and use.

There is something else I have been witnessing about this code base over possibly the most recent six months: it has been drawing closer to my concept. I suspect this change is significant because up until about six months ago, I thought that my concept could have been the product of insufficient reflection on the problems that it tried to address: namely, how does one make a claim on the devices in one's environment as if these devices were part of one's body - visceral claims about one's own car, one's Facebook page, one's PC, one's golf ball, one's bank account etc that are as strong as the same individual's claim to one's own hands, one's feet, one's fingernails, one's eyes, one's intestines etc.

Now, up to six months ago, the evolving code base - the changing implementation of the concept - was generally saying to me that it might only work if I made certain compromises to my concept. However, since I had worked out the Sovereign's Clique Space (this happened on 17 December 2012 when I posted my first account of this phenomenon) it now appears that what I had correctly labelled as "speculative faith" up to this point, had become a testable hypothesis.

In effect, I saw the way to the goal-posts when I observed the role that the Sovereign (labelled as the Account in my patent that I published in 2008 and a part of the data structure present in my concept since 2004) and the Sovereign's Clique Space played in allowing the individual to make visceral claims about things outside of a hominid form. These deliberations in December last year concluded my philosophical deliberations on the relationship of the possessor and that which is possessed in a detail which appears to have coincided with another event: the code base began to diminished in size by a significant amount. I am unaware of just how much it has diminished so far, but I believe it would be at least 20%. Other structures like the relationship between the Identity (erstwhile Active Affiliation), and its component Connections and Affiliations have gained clarity and robustness.

My deliberations on 17 December last year also demonstrated the efficacy of the Media Profile. This development included the overlaying concept of the Media Profile spine first thought useful as a mechanism to admit a process of obtaining progressively more delegated functionality through a particular device. The notion whereby subclass adaptations of the Media Profile, the Connection, the Active Affiliation, and the Participant to a specific medium was retained on all classes but the Active Affiliation after the deliberations on this earlier blog entry pointed to the redundancy of these "delegates"; it is not considered necessary that devices using a specific medium go through a multi-stage login process to obtain their Participant in their serving Agent Device's Clique.

I hope to see the observer mechanism, as a (Media Profile) spinal adaptation will realise a component almost as profound, and no less intertwined with, the concept of the Sovereign and its Clique Space. Although the specific specification of the observer mechanism is an artefact of development which emerged subsequent to the publishing of my patent, my original inspiration in 2004 was that Clique Spaces are manifest though collections of Agent Devices, each cooperating with others forming Cliques which may grow, shrink, and disband. The observer mechanism simply draws on the data model disclosed in the patent to ultimately realise this behaviour of the Agent Device.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Another line in my email signature: "Philosophy. Atheist gap-filler."

Sometimes this Clique Space thing gets me thinking about the nature of the self. Such thoughts are often the subject of religious dogma. My family background is Anglican, but I am not an adherent to any religious philosophy, save any familial and traditional ties to customs originating from Anglicanism and Christianity in general that still roost in my secular atheist belief system.

So, I like the quip in the title of this entry. It'll be my repartee to the conundrum that theists think they're presenting with the oft heard argument that "If one doesn't have God (a god), then how can one have morals?".

I think it'll also make a handy repellent. Make it so.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Implementation of the observer mechanism.

As I write this entry, I am taking some time away from coding the observer mechanism.

This observer mechanism, like any other mechanism that models and moderates the behaviour of devices within Clique Space is a medium. Hence, the observer mechanism must exhibit the structural components necessary for the representation of any medium in Clique Space: the abstract classes for the Media Profile, the Connection, and the Participant require implementations that can be instantiated.

However, the observer's medium is a medium that models a functional subset of the behaviour of the Agent Device, and hence, there are other structures that need to be implemented.

The Clique needs a subclass on the Agent Device: the observer Clique must contain only observer Participants. This Clique is importantly distinct from a Clique that models the way other media are modelled and controlled in that the observer Clique indicates which Agent Devices have knowledge of a specific component. Every observable component has an observer Clique when an Agent Device responsible for the creation and management of an observable component transmits knowledge of this component to another Agent Device. The Agent Device that created the observable component is the observer Clique's Owner, although in an observer Clique, like any other Clique, ownership can cede to another Agent Device, and so like any other Clique, the observer Clique is not anchored to any one location.

There is at least one minor issue with this model. If an observer Participant is a component (all of Clique Space's Elements are components), and if the observer Participant, in being a component other than a Clique, is observed, then how is that observer Participant observed? One cannot create another observer Clique because the creation of another observer Clique (Cliques - including the observer Clique - are components, but they are the only type of component that is not observable) would involve the creation of more observer Participants. This is an infinite regression, and so to avoid this, any specific observer Participant's observer Clique is the Clique which contains the observer Participant. This solution not only appears to be a convenient way of avoiding the infinite regress, but it appears to have a certain (though circular) logical necessity; in this mechanism, I feel echoes of the same necessarily visceral emotional base (the ego) that I seem to observe when I observe myself.

With this mechanism, component transmission can be tracked and controlled by a collection of Agent Devices. It appears that this mechanism is crucial to the cooperative activity of Agent Devices, and I believe this mechanism will have something to say about cognitive function in biological neural systems.

Anyway, implementation awaits...

Monday, May 27, 2013

The Individual as an Axiom

The pre-eminent concept of the pure individual is only now starting to emerge in discourse on identity. This "pure" individual ("pure" being a name I give here for lack of a better adjective, perhaps "abstract" is more fitting) delineates the activity of one set of devices from another. An individual in Clique Space(TM) knows one's self through one's Sovereign - one of a collection of well defined Clique Space Elements. Individuals assert claims on devices through Connections - another type of Clique Space Element, and claims on authority through Affiliations - another type of Clique Space Element.

Individuals project these claims to others via Identities which are another type of Clique Space Element. Individuals interact with each other using combinations of Affiliations and Connections projected through an Identity in a Clique; a Clique is not a Clique Space Element, but it is a collection of a well defined combinations of these earlier stated Elements for each individual which are expressed in a Clique as Participants which are Clique Space Elements. Each Participant expresses characteristics selected by each individual and agreed to by all individuals of the Clique; no Clique can exist without the mutual constraint affinity of each member Participant.

I believe that the preeminent concept of the individual as someone who makes assertions (as opposed to a device which does not - at least not without an individual to govern it) is something discourse in the identity community appears not to have fully embraced at this stage. I think, however, discourse is approaching a precipice over which the individual will be recognised as the only entity having the characteristic of making assertions. Once the individual and their capacity for assertion is accepted as a precondition of identity by society at large, many riddles about identity will resolve themselves, and a system like Clique Space will show its worth.

That's my hunch anyway.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

A crucial mechanism.

A short narrative about the structure of the Clique Space(TM) "component" mechanism is disclosed here.

******
Components are pieces of information that an Agent Device knows about.

Components are stored in an Agent Device's component container.

Components must implement methods which are called when added to and removed from the Agent Device's component container. These call-backs give the component implementations the opportunity to manage their lifecycle.

Cliques, Elements, Clique Spaces, and data representing external device state when represented in Clique Space, are all components. Cliques, Elements and Clique Spaces comprise state information relevant to Agent Devices - an Agent Device is merely a device which, through one or more Clique Spaces, is modelled in terms of the individual who possesses it as one or more Participants. Each Participant is associated to precisely one Clique and one Clique Space.

An observable component is a component to which an observer Clique can be assigned.

An observer Clique is a Clique that represents all Agent Devices which have a copy of a given observable component.

No observer Clique exists if only one Agent Device has a copy of the given component.

All components except the Clique and its observer Clique subtype are observable.

A communicable component is a component which can be transmitted by one Agent Device and received by another over a synapse.

All observable components except the Sovereign and the Sovereign's Clique Space are communicable.
******

One very interesting phenomenon about this mechanism is enabled in what is given in the final point of the above narrative: the Sovereign (specifically, the Sovereign's identifier) is known only to those Agent Devices in which the individual's presence is manifest. The Sovereign, and its Clique Space cannot be disclosed even between Agent Devices in which the individual's presence is manifest. The concept of an individual's sovereignty is so secret that Agent Devices which manifest the same individual presence cannot even communicate this information amongst themselves.

Why would a collection of Agent Devices (an Agent Collaboration) have anything to tell each other when they know who they are? A nervous system that makes up an individual has nothing of substance to share among its member neurons about the individual manifest by this membership; each individual member neuron already knows the individual it helps manifest by virtue of the fact that each member neuron possesses the secret which allows the individual to exist. This piece of information does not need to be communicated.

Instead, the individual manifest by an Agent Collaboration governed by a common Sovereign must be the only individual who knows the identifier of their own Sovereign. This identifier, after all, identifies the scope of their own existence. An individual may connect to their own Sovereign's Clique Space only if they know the value of their Sovereign's identifier. Hence, an individual would be well-placed never to allow another individual to know the value of their Sovereign's identifier; the consequences to such an individual's existence as a sovereign entity could be acutely bad.

On the flip side, the value of the Sovereign's identifier could be used as a private part to a key pair. An individual may still readily be identified as the presence manifest through different Connections, Affiliations or Identities if the individual wishes to disclose a digital signature with these Elements.

Hence, the value of the Sovereign's identifier (also the name of the Sovereign's Clique Space in my implementation) is a property which identifies an individual to themselves; a singular property of absolute value to the individual.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Another Clique Space(TM) usage scenario.

Say, I and two others are going out to have a dinner at a restaurant. The occasion is that it is a mother's day dinner out, and I am taking my mother (one of two other people) out to dinner. I am paying for her dinner, but the other individual is paying for their own meal.
 
Say, we all live in a world where Clique Space is commonplace. What, you might wonder, does this mean? At the most abstract level, this means that you possess one or more Agent Devices and you use your Agent Devices to cooperate with Agent Devices of other people in Cliques which form, grow, shrink, and disband within and between administrative domains called Clique Spaces. Agent Devices are devices like any other and have a physical manifestation like phones, cars, and computers. Other things like credit cards, Facebook pages, twitter accounts, bank accounts, and other abstract entities having a largely conceptual existence can be considered devices in Clique Space if they can exchange state information with one or more Agent Devices.
 
Now, back to the restaurant example, myself and the other two co-diners walk into the restaurant and meet the waiter. Before we are ushered to our table, the waiter verifies with us who is in our Clique, and who the Clique's Owner will be. I say I will be the Clique's Owner as I know who will be paying for who's meal; the waiter, an individual who has activated their "waiter" Affiliation through a selected Identity, gives me the Identity through which they have done this. I possess relevant Identities of my co-diners, and I use all Identities to form the Clique that I will own.
 
This Clique lasts for the duration of our meal. The restaurant uses the information in their account and in the service record of our waiter. I use the Clique to assert that I will pay for myself and my mother. The third diner accepts the condition that they pay for their own meal or the Clique wouldn't have been able to form. The waiter has joined my Clique because the Clique I have formed accepts that payment will be automatically deducted from each diner's account into the restaurant's account sufficient to pay the bill of service.
 
Each Participant has the opportunity to persist their individual Clique Space activity; interactions with others constitute this activity, and so each Participant has the opportunity to keep a record of this Clique in case there is any contention as to the bill, the proportion of the bill payed by each diner, the service offered by the waiter, or the activity recorded against other media like the bank's transaction system.
 
Each Participant except my mother disclosed their bank's transaction facility as a medium in this Clique. When the Clique formed, the devices that compose each Participant's transaction facility were nominated in the relevant Participant as Connections - activated against the relevant Identities by the individuals who hold the Identities (myself, the waiter, my mother, and the third diner) to be expressed in the corresponding Participant. Again, the Clique cannot form if the media requirements set by the Clique's Owner candidate (my candidate Participant) are not met by all other candidate Participants.
 
Hence, the Clique will only form if the medium and all constraints regarding the usage of this medium are met by all candidate Participants. Actual Participant instances will only be instantiated when constraint affinity can be met, and can only exist while ever constraint affinity can continue to be met.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Determination of the Clique's medium.

Right now, I feel that I can direct my attention toward some very central issues of the Clique Space(TM) purpose.

The light of my enquiry appears to shine almost squarely on the issue of determining the medium which every Participant in a specific Clique will have. This blog entry therefore is some deliberation over the considerations central to this mechanism, and some implications on other mechanisms incident by this mechanism.

Every candidate Participant supplies a collection of Connections which represent devices underlying a given Participant if it were created. Each candidate supplies a set of one or more Connections which have been activated against an Identity, also given in the candidate. The Clique's medium is determined primarily by the candidate which is nominated as the Owner Participant.

The Owner's medium is determined by iterating through the Owner candidate's given set of Connections. For each Connection, the associated Media Profile hierarchy is flattened, and returned as a set of Media Profiles. Each of these iterations progressively builds a baseline medium; each iteration is the logical union between the Media Profile name correspondence from the Connection of the given iteration with the set which has been built in previous iterations. One of the Owner candidate's Connections is nominated as the Participant's Connection: it is the Connection on the device spine which will yield the type of Participant desired; the Media Profile, the Connection, and the hypothetical Participant are collectively known as the device's spine. Each of these elements extends the respective abstract Clique Space's element class declaration.

The other member candidates describe other sets of Connections from the same or other identities through which a similar process of building a set of Media Profiles will happen. Each member contributes to determining the Clique's medium: at the end of determining the medium for each member, the Owner's medium is trimmed by finding the logical intersection between the Owner's medium and each member. This is done progressively until all members have been iterated through.

The final medium obtained in this process is the maximum degree of functionality common to all candidates which can be contained by the candidate Owner Participant. The final consideration regarding the medium is to determine whether the given medium will be accepted by the spinal Connection. The Clique cannot form if any Media Profile present in the candidate medium is not present in the spinal medium. The spinal medium is found by flattening the hierarchy of the given spine's Media Profile as it is for any of the candidates' media.

Each member Participant is assigned its own version of the Owner's medium. This is because medium equivalence is determined by the correspondence between the name of the Owner's and member's Media Profile name. Hence, the name of the Media Profile is sufficient to determine equivalence and this means that a member can specify a name-equivalent Media Profile from a different Clique Space. The use of name-equivalent, but different Media Profile instances for different candidates may become a consideration in determining the Clique's mode when determining whether a Clique can form.

In some ways, the Clique's mode is very similar to its medium, but considerations regarding the Clique's mode depend on consensus between all the Clique's members; not primarily on the Owner's functional capacity.

Calculating the mode is determined by marrying all the Limiting Constraints specified by a given candidate to the Enabling Constraints of the derived medium, and also evaluating whether all candidates share Limiting Constraint affinity; the Clique cannot form if one or more members have properties which contradict the intentions of others.

A more algorithmic explanation around determining the Clique's mode will be covered in a later blog entry. :)

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Something is sitting in my head.

I've got something in my head. I've been working on it in there since last Monday, and it'll have to remain in there until I file and serve my submissions in an application IBM's legal counsel have made in my case to have it struck out. Too bad there perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps I'll know on 19 April.

Back to my head and to the things therein.

I'm looking at what I perceive to be a solution that revisits deliberations around the same subject matter given in this entry in such a way that draws on the inherent abstract nature of the core data model. What is in my head is promising a lot.

In order to understand what is in my head, one needs to understand how every piece of information an Agent Device knows of (everything except Cliques) must be expressible as a component (well, more correctly, a transmissible component) before it can be propagated to other Agent Devices or projected to other V/PM-enabled devices. All components except the Sovereign's Clique Space are transmissible, and all transmissible components except the "observer" Participant are observable. Identifiers are not components, but do have a method named asQuantum that accepts no parameters.

The asQuantum method is also declared in the transmissible component interface so these type of components can be represented as a serialisable quantum which can be propagated or projected or persisted. All Elements implement the transmissible component interface, and delegate to the enclosed identifier's asQuantum method in the corresponding Element's asQuantum method.

The lovely observation my head has captured about the third category of component (the observable transmissible component) described above is that components of this type are indeed "observable". That is, these type of components have an observer - an "observer" Clique composed entirely of "observer" Participants. This Clique registers all devices (whether Agent Devices or any V/PM device - collectively  known as "observer" devices) that are interested in a particular "observable transmissible" component.

I can't wait to start work on this. I reckon this mechanism is the final key to a demonstrable prototype. The thing about this mechanism is that it (or the something that truly has to be implemented) has been in my head since mid-2004. It is only now, however, that the implementation of everything else had to be done before I was sufficiently prepared to investigate this observer mechanism.

Maybe I'm just a dickhead. Eureka!

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Another quick and dirty Clique Space(TM) description.

I wrote the following in a letter to someone, and I think it does a good job at giving the reader a basic understanding of my concept. The description is very quick, and, unlike this one, perhaps forsakes a lot of detail in an attempt to keep it within reach of the reader's attention. Here it is...

********

I'll give you a run-down about what Clique Space is supposed to be. A Clique Space is a cluster of Agent Devices. Agent Devices talk to each other by opening channels - forming logical synapses - between themselves. An Agent Device can accept connections to different external devices depending on whether the Agent Device can support the medium that the external device uses. Any device at all, so long as it can exchange state information with another device, is a candidate for connecting to an Agent Device.

Every device is a device in Clique Space. This includes Agent Devices; they're nothing special in terms of what Clique Space is supposed to model. At any instant in time, any device that is collaborating with one or more other devices is modeled in Clique Space as a Participant in a Clique. A Clique can therefore have two or more member participants. One participant is the Clique's owner.

This is what I think is going on in real time in our brains (neurons form Cliques which grow, shrink and disband and move like pseudopods throughout one's whole nervous system) and my Clique Space hypothesis, if I can prove that it at least works, may go on to show how one can get devices (or, rather, clusters of devices) to behave like people [10 April 2013 edit: who are really just clusters of devices otherwise known as cells]). I think the Agent Device is a synthetic equivalent of a neuron; and will demonstrate the functional necessity of the neuron, the synapse, the neurotransmitter, and various other structural features of biological nervous systems we know exist.

********

Whatever description I could put in writing, I don't think I could cover the concept as comprehensively as I could if I disclosed the code. Yet, so far, the code I have is incomplete, and so the code does not even comprehensively cover the concept as it exists in my mind. Maybe sometime, I'll be able to present an implementation, and therefore prove the concept works.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Telework and CEO stupidity.

Clique Space(TM) came about because I wanted a system that informed others of my real-time activity over anything that can connect to and exchange information with a Clique Space. However, in this short blog entry, I will talk of my frustrations - frustrations which mothered my invention. I'm going to offer a brief opinion on how Yahoo's chief executive made a strategic decision last week that bordered on insane for its lack of forethought.

Technology created to realise of a mode of work that society has long desired, exists in a society that levels blame at the feet of this mode whenever things unrelated to it need to be fixed. The fact that an edict can come down to rescind a telework condition from employees, as though it were a light switch that is tuned on and off at the whims of a micromanager looking for something other than management philosophy to demonise, only underscores the blatant wanton stupidity of some who have been selected into executive positions.

Someday, I hope telework will become a condition that is not subject to the whims of micromanaging idiots. Maybe someday, and organisation called The Clique Space Organisation will provide a sanctuary for development teams to produce quality software without a CEO who wants to blame flagging revenues and market share on the fuzzy notion that telework isn't "what is right for [The Clique Space Organisation] right now".

Employees at Yahoo who find their telework restored can only look forward to the privilege being removed again whenever the CEO wants to be seen to be addressing another unrelated problem. Fix the real cause of your company's problem Marissa Mayer; it sure as hell isn't telework.

Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York city is reported to have said that telework is “one of the dumber ideas I’ve ever heard.”. I think that you, Mr Bloomberg, are an anachronism waiting for time to wash away.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Two more proprietary claims.

In addition to these claims, I make the following in relation to terms used in Clique Space(TM).
  • The Clique Space Sovereign or the term "Sovereign" as it would appear in relationship to the discussion of Clique Space or any related concept.
  • The Clique Space Mode Profile or the term "Mode Profile" as it would appear in relationship to the discussion of Clique Space or any related concept.
These new claims are new terms I have chosen to express the concepts labelled Axle and Account Profile of the previous post respectively.The existing claims still stand.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Agent Device assembly and analogue to a neuron.

Since I now have established a relatively stable implementation of the core data model, I have been adapting the Agent Device to it. This has actually gone through smoother than I imagined.

The core Element declarations were no big problem to implement in the Agent Device, and since the identifiers and their factory and quanta are generically closed in the core data model (inside the common Clique Space project - shared between Agent Device and administrator client), the Agent Device readily accepted the changes.

[Edit 19 March 2013: Much of the time,] I love this Clique Space (TM) adventure. I find that the architecture talks to me at least as much as I direct its form. As I walk through this journey, the concept reminds me of how similar its function is to that of a neuron.

For instance, I had to ponder a bit today about how external devices interface with a serving Agent Device. Now, a cluster of one or more Agent Devices form an Agent Collaboration. This Agent Collaboration constructs a Clique which is modelling a collaboration going on in another cluster of one or more external devices. Each external device is represented by one or more Participants in the Clique which represents this external device collaboration in one or more Clique Spaces; the Clique spans Clique Spaces when it contains Participants (a Clique must contain a minimum of two Participants) from two or more Clique Spaces.

Now, each Participant has at least one Connection which represents precisely one channel of communication between precisely one external device and precisely one Agent Device. The Agent Device from whence the Connection serving the external device originates could be of the same Agent Device as the one from whence the Participant originates; but then it may not be, and this fact might promise some rather interesting phenomena to do with the makeup of individual Participants. However, this aside, the dilema I had today was based around the question of knowing which Agent Device served which external device through which Connection.

This question is resolved nicely around the notions of generic closure of the Elements. This "generic closure" notion is one I've come to like as I have developed my idea in Java. Like the identifiers and their factories and quanta, the Elements come in a bottom and a top half. The bottom half of these structures create a "generically open" mechanism where classes and interfaces are parameterised in such a way that allows strong and circular type conveyance between almost all methods - certainly all methods that convey one Element out of another.

When implementing the top half of these open structures, one "generically closes" the bottom half with the desired implementation that the particular device requires. Neither the implemented identifiers, factory or quanta, nor the Elements require further parameterisation; hence the term. However - and this is very convenient indeed because it promises to overcome the dilemma I had pondered today - these generically closed implementations are regular Java classes, and hence can still be extended.

Now, considering the requirement that a single Agent Device must be responsible for serving a single external device, this extensibility can be applied to any given Connection as this given Connection is created on the Agent Device maintaining this service channel. This Agent Device can then transmit this Connection to other Agent Devices as necessary, and when the receiving Agent Devices reconstruct the transmitted Connection , they need only create the conventional underived version of the Connection.

This is especially good since the derived type of Connection object does not need to be conveyed in the connection identifier's quantum; this quantum is the first thing that is transmitted to an Agent Device (the receiver). This quantum lets the receiver know of the existence of a Connection Element identified by the identifier's value contained in the quantum object. As the receiver isn't the server for the Connection, it needn't create the extended Connection class. So, the receiver needn't even know of what the extended class the transmitter (or rather - because the receiver can be a link in a chain of transmissions and retransmissions - the originator) is extended as. Hence, any Agent Device can receive any type of connection object even if a given Agent Device does not have the extended version of the Connection class loaded in its JVM.

Quaint and rather good, that one. Still, a Connection, like any other Element, can contain any number and type of components it likes. One will probably have a need to deal with dynamic class loading and RMI code-base servers in time... a frustrating situation which will probably see me looking for a good library that will allow one Agent Device to load classes from another, or perhaps, to put one of these together myself.

Returning directly to the analogue with the neuron, this knowledge of the Connection type only by the Element's originator serves, I imagine, a very similar purpose to an organism which has only a subset of its interconnected neurons sending an receiving signals directly from cells of other organs. Most neurons merely relay signals from one neuron to the next, and hence, neither have, nor need, knowledge themselves of how those neurons connected to a cell of another organ actually serve these communication channels. The relay neurons, however, can, because they must, still convey information about these other cells.

Hence, the concept of a specialised Connection type appears to fit the purpose for those neurons (Agent Devices) which interface channels with cells of another organ (external Devices), while the general Connection type is what is constructed on the relay neurons.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Clique Space(TM) Progress Report

I think I now have a stable implementation of the data structure (data model) that realises the basic Clique Space capability. This basic data structure is manifest in the Clique Space project, and is built on in the Agent Device and administrator client (Client Device) projects so to specialise the basic data structure for these two devices.

The basic data structure is a marvel in its use of Java generics. To achieve type consistency between all the Elements, the Clique, the Clique Space, the Clique Space container, and the device implementations, each class is declared in almost an identical way. I think nothing has ever used Java's generic class parameterisation feature quite the same way that I have done here.