Artificial life programming in the robust-first attractor

Despite mounting awareness of the liabilities of deterministic CPU and RAM computing, across industry and academia there remains little clear vision of a fundamental, general-purpose alternative. To obtain indefinitely scalable computer architectures offering improved robustness and security, we have advocated a realignment of the roles of hardware and software based on artificial life principles. In this paper we propose an active media computational abstraction to underlie such a hardware-software renegotiation. The active media framework is much in the spirit of probabilistic cellular automata, but designed for indefinite scalability and serious programmability, rather than simplicity and analytic tractability. We discuss active media programming techniques based on living systems principles, and present anecdotal data from sample programs to introduce a new programming language called ulam, that we are developing as an underlying language for active media.