Plan is dead, long live Dogma!

As explained in the strategy update of 2019-06-16, We will continue the effort of completing the "plan" part of OctoMY™. But "plan" is not the best of word to describe this concept. In this post will explore the alternatives. I want the word we settle on to be self explanatory, short and memorable.

So what is it that we will be naming?

It is a declaration of all the rules by which a group of agents will abide. The rules are written in a declarative language where the possible states and the possible transitions between them are described in high level terms.

The transitions are triggered by external events available to the individual agent via their respective hardware, and deterministic logic, and it is up to the individual agent to determine in which state they ought to be at any point in time.

The collaboration of agents is supported by the specification of shared secrets that allow agents to communicate securely whenever within range of one another. Each agent may interpret communication received from both trusted and distrusted agents.

Agents are expected to have a set of sensors that provide good input to form events from. Events may be such things as a change in location, a discovery of a landmark or identification of a person.

While the "rules" are usually handwritten by the people that own the agents, it should be possible to generate the rules programatically, and the syntax of the language may be extended in the future to support powerful open-ended ways of controlling the agents.

Using https://www.thesaurus.com I have arrived at the following alternatives that more succinctly describe what may be the most important part of the OctoMY™ project:

• Decree
• Precept
• Prescript
• Dogma
• Doctrine
• Edict
• Ordinance
• Tenet

From this, I think the one I like the most is "Dogma". While edict is maybe more accurate, dogma sounds cooler and I never heard the word edict before I did this research. So from now on, "plan" will be renamed to "Dogma".