Proteus is a small but powerful language for making descriptions of things. It's a "modeling language." Instead of modeling a lot of data points representing the state of the modeled system, Proteus takes advantage of the fact that information = state (i.e., 256 states=1 byte information). Proteus models represent the way information flows through physical systems such as the information flow from a bike’s pedals through the chain into the wheel then into the ground thus changing the bikes location i.e., spatial state. In the presentation I’ll show how this works and why representing states as information flow rather than as data points make the language map in an interesting way to some aspects of natural languages and how this might be used to simplify various computing tasks.
Bruce Long began his undergraduate studies in computer science, winning ACM competitions and other awards. Bruce rapidly realized that getting computers to really understand information about the world required a new way of thinking about the world. He ended up completing a BA and an MA in philosophy, studying the structures of logic, language, and how they convey meaning about reality. He then enrolled in a PhD program in theoretical computer science at the University of Westminster in London.
The result of Bruce’s studies was a mathematical concept refined from Keith Devlin’s concept of an infon — a piece of information — leading to a theory of the structure of state systems. After refining the math through a number of papers and talks, Bruce has produced an elegant software package ideal for modeling even highly conceptual aspects of the world: Proteus.
