[erlang-questions] Process Dictionary limitations??

[Charles Hixson]

On 10/11/2012 02:20 AM, Attila Rajmund Nohl wrote:
> 2012/10/11 Charles Hixson<charleshixsn@REDACTED>:
>> I'm choosing a language to implement a ... well, neural network is wrong,
>> and so is cellular automaton, but it gives the idea.  Anyway, I'm going to
>> need, in each cell, a few stateful items, e.g. activation level.
>>
>> When I look at what Erlang can do, I see that the Process Dictionary looks
>> as if it would serve my needs, but then I am immediately warned not to use
>> it, that it will cause bugs.  These stateful terms will not be exported from
>> the cell within which they are resident.  Is this still likely to cause
>> problems?  Is there some better approach to maintaining state?  (I can't
>> just generate a new process, because other cells will need to know how to
>> access this one, or to test that it has been rolled out.)
> I don't really understand why you can't generate a new process for
> each cell - just send a message to the neighbouring cells that there's
> a new cell. I think each cell needs to know its neighbours anyway.
>
Because lots of other processes would have links to the cell that were 
the process id.  (There isn't really any other way to link to an active 
process.)  It doesn't know who has these links.  "Neighbors" isn't the 
right way to think about it, as they aren't neighbors in any meaningful 
sense of the term.  (The links are one way.)

Perhaps I should have called it a weighted directed graph, but that 
isn't quite the right model either.  But with that analogy the weights 
need to be adjustable.  Or I could have called it a neural net, but that 
also isn't quite the right model, at least as I understand it.

Each cell needs to know the cells that it links to, and the cell that 
most recently linked to it.  And it's activation level.  And the weight 
of each link to a "following" cell.  The activation levels and weights 
need to be able to change, but should not be visible outside the cell 
(though the cell should be able to receive messages that causes it to 
change these values).

It's also possible that eventually I might need some "regional values", 
that would do things like adjust the sensitivity of all cells in a 
region to being activated, but I can see a way to do that with message 
passing (though it does add significantly to the overhead).  OTOH, maybe 
I'll never need these "emotional variations".  (So far I don't have a 
well-defined idea of what "region" would mean.)

-- 
Charles Hixson