[fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: Miller & Shapiro on Hayek's market - explaining object orientations

[iang@iang.org]

 Financial Cryptography Update: Miller & Shapiro on Hayek's market - explaining object orientations 

                             June 16, 2005


------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000503.html



------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was struck how the Introduction to Miller & Shapiro's new draft on
concurrency control sought to integrate economics and programming. 
Here's the Introduction, stolen in fine Hayekian tradition for your
reading pleasure.  The paper is for full publication somewhere or other
(so it will miss out on the bona fide FC++ advantage) but I couldn't
help from letting slip this teaser!

===================================

The fundamental constraint we face as programmers is complexity. It
might seem that the systems we can successfully create would be limited
to those we can understand. Instead, every day, massive numbers of
programmers successfully contribute code towards working systems too
complex for anyone to understand as a whole. Instead, we make use of
mechanisms of abstraction and modularity to construct systems whose
components we can understand piecemeal, and whose compositions we can
again understand without fully understanding the components being
composed.

To understand these twin problems, of separating components and of
composing them, we draw on Friedrich Hayek's examination of how markets
address the twin problems of plan coordination: bringing about the
cooperative alignment of separately conceived plans, while
simultaneously avoiding disruptive plan interference [Hayek45]. His
explanation of the need for property rights parallels the rationale for
encapsulation in object-oriented systems: to provide a domain (an
object's encapsulation boundary) in which an agent (the object) can
execute plans (the object's methods) that use resources (the object's
private state), where the proper functioning of these plans depends on
these resources not being used simultaneously by conflicting plans. By
dividing up the resources of society (the state of a computational
system) into separately owned chunks (private object states), we enable
a massive number of plans to make use of a massive number of resources
without needing to resolve a massive number of conflicting assumptions.

But a single object cannot do much by itself. Instead, both objects and
markets use abstraction to compose plans together into vast cooperative
networks, such as subcontracting graphs, where one agent, employing
only its local knowledge, will subcontract out subtasks to others,
often in great ignorance of how each subtask will be carried out
[Lachmann, Lavoie, Tulloh02].

"Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic
but by the completeness of their case analysis.  Alan Perlis"

The problem Hayek was concerned with, how humans coordinate their plans
with each other, certainly has many differences from the world of
programming. For purposes of this paper, the most interesting
difference is that, in the human world, the intelligence of the entity
who formulates a plan is comparable to the entity who executes the
plan. Therefore, the plan doesn't have to prepare for every possible
contingency. If something unusual happens, you'll probably be better
able to figure out what to do then anyway. By contrast, when writing a
program, we must express a plan that can deal with all possible
relevant contingencies. Even under sequential and benign conditions,
the resulting case analysis can be quite painful. As we extend our
reach into concurrency, distribution, and mutual suspicion, each of
these dimensions threatens an explosion of new cases. To succeed at all
three simultaneously, we must find ways to reduce the number of
additional cases we need to worry about.

====================================

Mark later pointed out that he has an entire paper on the Austrian
market process, here: 
http://www.erights.org/talks/categories/categories.html

-- 
Powered by Movable Type
Version 2.64
http://www.movabletype.org/