On blocks and boxes

At its most basic, Flat Galaxy will consist of blocks with inputs and outputs. These blocks or "affectors," are the most fundamental system in the model. They will be the pieces that larger systems are made up of. To continue the body model from the last post, the affectors in the body will be the major physical systems, as well as the organs. The body itself will not be an affector since you don't affect anything with your "body." You can touch something with your hand, in which case the affector was your muscles which controlled your hand.

The idea is not to make everything an affector--just the things that make sense. In the example above, your brain-block affector would have an output to your musculoskeletal system-block, which would have an output to your arm-block, then hand-block. We could become more fine-grained later and have finger-blocks. The nice thing about the "block" system is that we can create new ones very easily. All we have to do is define its inputs, its outputs and the way in which its inputs and outputs are affected within the block.

Confusing? Another example:

We want a body made up of organs and systems. We have a definition of this body: it must have one heart, one brain, one head, one nervous system. That's it. That's our body. (Let's not discuss where the heart goes.) Once we plug the necessary affector blocks into the body-box we will have a working body. The health of our body is determined by a combination of the health of the blocks within. If all four blocks are perfectly healthy, our body is at its maximum health. Now let's say we want a stronger heart to raise our overall health, so we take out the old heart and find a stronger heart--let's say 2x stronger--laying around our lab somewhere and drop it in, and now our overall health has increased. The difference between the two hearts was that the stronger one contributes more to the overall health of the body.

Our body blocks aren't currently connected to each other (normally, though, certain connections would be required in the body definition), which means each block simply contributes some value to the body's health and that's it. In this type of body, if one block "dies," the body dies because it no longer meets the body's required definition. If we connect our body parts together what happens? We'll connect the brain to the heart and the nervous system, the heart to the brain and the nervous system to the head. Now what? Well, either in the block's definition or the body's definition (haven't decided yet), each block can contribute to the health of anything it has an output connected to, meaning that our overall health can increase with our connections (but so does the potential for failure).

To avoid having to write code to detect cycles or feedback loops, such as where our brain is connected to our heart and our heart to our brain, we only process each block once when a change is detected in any block, and a change in a block resulting from this processing can't trigger another go-round.

Things I haven't decided yet:

1. Body box definition determines A) the value each block gets (and therefore contributes) and/or B) the factor by which each block contributes (e.g., heart contributes 2x its value) to overall health.

or

2. Affector blocks determine A) their own inherent value and/or B) the factor by which they contribute to overall health.