What is agoric computing?
Most computer resources (CPU time, disk space, communication lines) are allocated by simple, crude algorithms such as first come, first serve. This leads to waste (disks filling up due to a few careless users, CPU-intensive programs delayed while many nodes spend much of their time waiting for keystrokes). These top-down-designed software systems resemble centrally planned economies, and like central economic planning, they work on a small scale, but begin to break down on a larger scale. Agoric computing aims to improve on this by introducing pricing mechanisms and free-market style trading between software objects. Initially this is likely to involve direct decisions by end users about how badly they need resources; eventually many software objects should use this market to subcontract tasks in place of what is now a fixed subroutine call. Ecology of Computation, edited by B. A. Huberman, Elsevier Science Publishers (1988), contains several papers on this subject (the two by Mark Mil
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