Part I, II, III, IV, V, VI In Part I of this multi-part article,
I wrote that the master/slave approach to elementary behavior
control in the COSA programming model should be extended to
high-level software construction. My thesis is that this control
mechanism is so simple and intuitive that it will revolutionize
computer programming by moving it out of the exclusive realm of
computer nerds into that of the average computer user. Since
COSA is inherently parallel, this will, in effect, solve the
parallel programming problem. Below, I go over the elementary
principles of control used in COSA. Most of us are familiar with
the controls that come with many of our electrical and
electronic appliances. Some may be a little bit fancier than
others but almost all come equipped with a minimum set of
controls: the on/off (start/stop) buttons. To reuse the metaphor
of the previous post, we are the masters and the appliances are
the slaves. It turns out that motor command neurons in the
brain’s basal ganglia use a simil