An Experiment in Scotch

Steve Yegge has writ­ten a fas­ci­nat­ing, thought-provoking arti­cle on embed­ded sys­tems. In it, he dis­cusses embed­ded sys­tems ala games ala Mario Kart and muses on the invis­i­ble bound­ary around all embed­ded sys­tems, how infor­ma­tion gets into and out of embed­ded sys­tem and the pos­si­ble ram­i­fi­ca­tions when we think about all things as embed­ded systems.

A key point:

In our dis­cus­sion so far, I have inten­tion­ally blurred the dis­tinc­tion between the host sys­tem (such as a fish tank or a game con­sole device) and the host system’s host sys­tem (such as your bed­room or liv­ing room). But you’ve prob­a­bly noticed by now that all host sys­tems are embed­ded in some larger sys­tem. This is just the way things work. The fish tank is in your bed­room, which is a sys­tem embed­ded in a house, which is a sys­tem embed­ded in a neigh­bor­hood, embed­ded in a county, a nation, a con­ti­nent, a planet, a solar sys­tem, a galaxy, a universe.

It’s per­haps not as clear in the case of fish tanks, but host sys­tems often over­lap and even coop­er­ate. A city is com­posed of many inter­leaved sub­sys­tems. So is your body. It’s not always a sim­ple con­tain­ment rela­tion­ship. Sys­tems are made of, and com­mu­ni­cate with, other systems.

But one way or another, all sys­tems are embed­ded systems.

If all sys­tems are embed­ded sys­tems, isn’t it pos­si­ble that our lit­tle cor­ner of the galaxy is an embed­ded sys­tem that is con­trolled in some way by infor­ma­tion that enters our sys­tem, unknown to us, through the holes that Steve talks about? And couldn’t our uni­verse be another embed­ded sys­tem within some host sys­tem that we can’t even begin to com­pre­hend but that is con­trol­ling our uni­verse in invis­i­ble ways? Isn’t this what God (or Bud­dha or The Pink Uni­corn or your deity of choice) does? He works in mys­te­ri­ous ways, right? But if he does, and if all sys­tems are in some way embed­ded sys­tems, what is God’s (or Buddha’s or The Pink Unicorn’s) host sys­tem? Whoops, my mind just exploded.

It’s an approach­able arti­cle even if you aren’t a pro­gram­mer and I highly rec­om­mend it. It IS long so print it out and read it in the bath­room or on the train but do read it. It’s not so much about pro­gram­ming (though I think he’ll get there even­tu­ally) as it is about meta­phys­i­cal ques­tions about our exis­tence. At least to me it is.