The Computer Admin problem

[Will Pearson]

To give some idea of what I want to talk about here, I'll outline the
problem I am trying to solve.

I am trying to make a step towards solving the Admin problem, that is:
The average human doesn't make a good computer administrator.

So can we make computers do the admin work for us, and better? Well,
first things first, let us define the problem.

Assume you have a computer with a Set of resources (memory, processing
power) and programs can exclusively own resources. Ownership is
represented by pairs. You want the system to find and maintain the
pairings between program and resources in such a way that the user is
satisfied with the operation of the system.

This is obviously intractable in a few ways, the space of programs is
infinite. And doing large scale random searches of the space will
probably make the computer perform in a way that upsets the user by
making the system inoperable. So I doubt we are going to find nice
clean mathematical formalisations of how to solve it.

Currently programming languages or operating systems don't deal well
with ownership. If you share a bit of memory with another process for
reading they can write to it as well. So this is the first thing to
fix, we need a good security model to preserve ownership. Capability-
based security[1] provides the best abstraction I have come across for
this, so I think this is the gold standard to try and beat at the
moment.

While capability based system It doesn't say how to assign resources.
One of the most flexible way of assigning resources is a free market.
The user, in this case, acting as the money source. Ideas along these
lines have been suggested before by many, Drexler/Miller [2] and Baum
[3] spring to mind. Yet it has not been fully explored in the way I
wish, with pre-programmed agents with a decent idea of what they are
doing seeded into it.

I will go into more detail for these choices in later posts.

Will Pearson


[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security
[2] http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html
[3] http://www.whatisthought.com/eric.html#economies