Virtue — A different approach to human/computer interaction

Abstract

Throughout the development of computing tools usage and computer science, from the calculating machines up and into the present day computers, the major technical problem to be solved was the reduction of the amount of components and their bulk. This led inevitably to the use of serial processing. Only quite recently we started mass producing and using multi-processing. Though the nature itself is infinitely parallelised, the technical problems of computer development led also to the development of such software tools and programming languages which mirrored the serial nature of computers, so that the serialisation of parallel natural processes is performed by humans, the programmers. However, modern day developments of scientific and every-day needs for computing power have led to the introduction of multiprocessors, GPUs, clusters, grids and clouds of computers, as to ascertain enough processing speed, power and memory for very complex algorithms. However, the human/computer interaction that supports these developments is still heavily based on “classical” computer programming languages, serial programming, and the multi-computer environment is accessed only through programmed interfaces, where all the burden of parallelising the, now well known, serial algorithms is again the job of (human) programmers. Virtue is a development primarily based on the idea - as there already is so much we know of mathematical, logical and other important basic algorithms used in many fields, and their computer implementation(s) - that we would be able to “raise” the level of computer “understanding” more towards the level of our own, human language communication. This means that, for example, mathematical operations in Virtue are performed not only on integers and reals (floats), but also on complex numbers, quaternions and octonions, and that they are freely intermixed. Or that all logical operations work also on multi-levelled and multi-dimensional logical values (and not just Boolean). These are mathematically well defined operations used very often in visualisations, as well as scientific modelling. Furthermore, another basic underlying idea of the development of Virtue is that the language developed may not destroy a possibly parallel structure of data, which then allows direct and user (human) independent automatic parallel execution. Within such an approach interactive sentences can be “decoded” (executed, performed, saved, used...) on a single processor, a multi-core, multiprocessor, GPU, cluster, grid or cloud system, or any combination of them. Designed on these basic principles, Virtue is a language which proposes a different approach, by keeping the inherent parallel structure of natural algorithms, and doing the parallel processing by itself, if it is algorithmically possible. Virtue is a syntactically very simple, yet semantically extremely complex language, offering no “reserved words”, synonyms, automation of memoisation, multiple word contexts, combined data types of anything Virtue supports (e.g. functions, symbol names, scalars, multidimensional sub-structured arrays etc.), stochastic processing, multivalued and multidimensional logic operations, multidimensional sub-structured file access structures, continuations etc. Therefore, due to this semantic richness and grammatical simpleness, in Virtue, for example, the text of the algorithm for Conway's “Game of Life” necessitates only 12 language tokens (7 words, 14 numbers in 3 vectors and 2 delimiters) in one sentence. 1 Further development of the idea allows for development of a more syntactically rich very high level human oriented machine interaction language, which, combined with additional artificial intelligence components, appropriate ergonomic human presentation/sensory interfaces and with the integration of user style association memory, we sincerely hope can help the future development of Computer Science and Usage Practice.