Dave Ackley presents robust-first computing and the ULAM programming language for the Movable Feast Machine, a cellular-automata-like architecture. It was a short video for the Future Programming Workshop 2015.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN points to it as an entry into Ackley's indefinitely scalable computing project, with a network-switch demo recommended as the best place to start.
“I think the best place to start is this demo of a network switch made out of cells”HN comment, 2019
“I think the best place to start is this demo of a network switch made out of cells”
Demo of a network switch built from cells
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I'll always upvote Dave Ackley. His vision for computing is so audacious it seems unbelievable. Global consistency? Don't need it! Determinism? An illusory safety blanket for wimps and suckers! Sure, everyone talks a big game about eventual consistency, but who's signing up to use an eventually consistent CPU? Dave freakin' Ackley, that's who. And the whole thing would sound like blue-sky bullshit except he's out there actually building it. I think the best place to start is this demo of a network switch made out of cells: this video (and then watch the rest of the video if you liked that) His more recent videos are weekly updates on a "T2 Tile" prototype made out of 3d printed parts, custom PCBs, and like a hundred BeagleBones: link Also, all his code is on GitHub: link
RecommendsDonHopkinsJul 2025
“I'm a huge fan of Dave Ackley's”
Robust-first philosophy applied to computing and LLM coding
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Me to, and I'm always battling with the LLM's obsession with lazily writing reams of ridiculously defensive code and masking errors in the code it generates and calls, instead of finding the root cause and solving that. (Yes, I'm referring to the code LLMs generate, not the API for generating code itself, but "fail early and spectacularly" should apply to all code and apis.) But you have to draw the line at failures that happen in the real world, or in code you can't control. I'm a huge fan of Dave Ackley's "Robust First" computing architecture, and his Moveable Feast Machine. His "Robust First" philosophy is extremely relevant and has a lot of applications to programming with LLMs, not just hardware design. Robust First | A conversation with Dave Ackley (T2 Tile Project) | Functionally Imperative Podcast link Robust-first computing: Beyond efficiency link Bottom up engineering for robust-first computing link Living Computation: Robust-first programming in ULAM this videolink DonHopkins on Feb 11, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Growing Neural Cellular Automata: A Differentiable... Also check out the "Moveable Feast Machine", Robust-first Computing, and this Distributed City Generation example: link DonHopkins on Oct 26, 2017 | parent | favorite | on: Cryptography with Cellular Automata (1985) [pdf] A "Moveable Feast Machine" is a "Robust First" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. It's similar to a Cellular Au
Cites itdaveackleyNov 2015
“There's also a more recent 'router' demo(1)”
Router demo that builds its own boundary
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There's also a more recent 'router' demo(1) that -- though still rigid and rectangular -- does build its own boundary rather than relying on the grid boundary. (1) this video
Cites itakkartikJul 2019
“The underlying project for programming using Cellular Automata”
Underlying project for programming with cellular automata
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More links. The underlying project for programming using Cellular Automata: this video . Previously on HN: link There's a Youtube channel: link Sources: link Paper for city generation in particular: link
