Introduction to the Actor Model of Computation

This repository hosts slides and code for a brief introduction to the Actor Model of Computation.

Slides

The slides are generated from the IPython notebook Introduction.ipynb (it can be viewed online, but needs to run to generate the HTML slides).

Code

The module that implements a minimal actor language is tartpy. The examples and instructions to install are in the IPython notebook Examples.ipynb.

References

This is a list of references mentioned in the slides and examples, plus some other miscellanea material, in no order, with some comments.

• Gul Agha. Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems. Doctoral Dissertation. 1986.

  A comprehensive book with good details on patterns. It discusses an operational model.

• Gul Agha, Ian Mason, Scott Smith, Carolyn Talcott. A Foundation for Actor Computation. Journal of Functional Programming, January 1993.

  More mathematical, but good discussions on configurations and composability.

• Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop and Richard Steiger. A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence. IJCAI’73.

• Carl Hewitt. Actor Model of Computation: Scalable Robust Information Systems. Inconsistency Robustness 2011, Stanford University.

  A good overview of many topics, including a very big list of references.

• Dale Schumacher. It's Actors All The Way Down. (blog)

  Extremely clear explanations, and another minimal actor language (Hummus). Make sure to read the full archive.

• Dale Schumacher. Actor Idioms. Agere! @ Splash 2012.

  Discussion on common patterns (PDF).