When I was a freshman in college, I took an introduction to psychology course that required either a field trip to a mental institution or an independent project of my own choice. I chose the later because I had developed an interest in how human memory works, and also perhaps due to a certain amount of squeamishness about the insane.
My project was inspired by a television program where a "memory magician", whose name I (ironically) can't recall, would begin by being introduced to each person in the audience. Later, after performing some other tricks, he would recite each person's name correctly as they stood up. He said that this feat was not accomplished by magic tricks, but was due to a system that anyone could learn, and went on to explain that the key to remembering was to associate something in the sound or meaning of the words with a visual image of the person. This was not like a trivial example of say, Mr. Green wearing a green shirt, but something outlandish and unforgettable. I didn't learn exactly what this meant because, as it turned out, in order to learn this secret method, I had to send in $29.95 for a pamphlet and audio tape.
So armed with only this one rather questionable bit of knowledge, I begin my project on memory systems. Rather than doing research and regurgitating the work of others, I decided that I would perform a field test and report my results. Since I couldn't really persuade dozens of strangers to meet my test subjects, I felt that the next best thing would be to have the subjects memorize a list of 200 words arranged in two columns. The test would be to produce the second word when given the first after hearing the list only once.
Now associating 100 pairs of nouns that were randomly chosen from the dictionary sounded quite a bit more difficult than memorizing names, and I fully expected the tests to report rather poor results, which I hoped wouldn't affect my grade on the project, since in science, results are results. Imagine my surprise when my first two test subject were able to recall all 100 responses correctly when given the key word! I tried the system myself and found it was absurdly easy to memorize any number of noun - noun associations. The only magic required was to connect the two with a visual image of an outlandish and unforgettable action. I still remember the first pair of words on my list: squirrel - doorknob. What I did was to imagine a squirrel opening a door in the sky and peering out. This image was so vivid that it has stuck in my mind for mumble mumble years.
Needless to say, I was pretty excited to report my astonishing discovery, but it turns out that the market for associating random lists of nouns was a lot smaller than you would think. What people really want is help remembering names and dates and numbers, which is quite a bit different (try coming up with something outlandish to help remembering say, October 20, 1987). The only thing that really helps with that is the personal computer, which came along mumble years later. That brings me (finally) to the subject of this article, which is using Blackboard Systems to improve your programs.
Real blackboards first appeared in a Philadelphia school in 1809 and were made of pine wood colored with a mixture of egg white and charred potatoes( mmm, can't you smell those potatoes charring in the Franklin stove?) They served pretty much the same purpose as whiteboards do today, as a place to display information that everyone in a room can read.
Software blackboards occupy much the same niche as their real world equivalents. They store data using associative lists in a readily accessible location for the purpose of communicating information between a program's various objects or subprograms. A program may contain more than one blackboard, for instance, if the application allows multiple documents to opened at one time, it might have both an application blackboard and a document blackboard. The application blackboard would be used to store or remember information that pertained to the behavior of the whole application, and the document blackboard's scope would be limited to one document or window.
Some examples of data that might belong in a text editor's blackboard include, the last font chosen, color, font size, number of spaces in a tab, and justification mode. It might be a good idea to store this data in the persistent blackboard for the application so that each new document will inherit the same defaults for these settings.
How useful blackboard data structures can be is not readily apparent until you start using them. It is one of those concepts you keep finding more and more uses for over time. It seems that object oriented technology has brought increased capability for abstraction though information hiding, but there always seems to be a need to access data outside the object metaphor though methods like relational databases or blackboards.
When blackboards or similar structures (like the Windows registry) are used for communication between cooperating programs, it becomes close to the biological concept of stigmergy which is the name given to the communication between social insects facilitated by the structures they build.
My project was inspired by a television program where a "memory magician", whose name I (ironically) can't recall, would begin by being introduced to each person in the audience. Later, after performing some other tricks, he would recite each person's name correctly as they stood up. He said that this feat was not accomplished by magic tricks, but was due to a system that anyone could learn, and went on to explain that the key to remembering was to associate something in the sound or meaning of the words with a visual image of the person. This was not like a trivial example of say, Mr. Green wearing a green shirt, but something outlandish and unforgettable. I didn't learn exactly what this meant because, as it turned out, in order to learn this secret method, I had to send in $29.95 for a pamphlet and audio tape.
So armed with only this one rather questionable bit of knowledge, I begin my project on memory systems. Rather than doing research and regurgitating the work of others, I decided that I would perform a field test and report my results. Since I couldn't really persuade dozens of strangers to meet my test subjects, I felt that the next best thing would be to have the subjects memorize a list of 200 words arranged in two columns. The test would be to produce the second word when given the first after hearing the list only once.
Now associating 100 pairs of nouns that were randomly chosen from the dictionary sounded quite a bit more difficult than memorizing names, and I fully expected the tests to report rather poor results, which I hoped wouldn't affect my grade on the project, since in science, results are results. Imagine my surprise when my first two test subject were able to recall all 100 responses correctly when given the key word! I tried the system myself and found it was absurdly easy to memorize any number of noun - noun associations. The only magic required was to connect the two with a visual image of an outlandish and unforgettable action. I still remember the first pair of words on my list: squirrel - doorknob. What I did was to imagine a squirrel opening a door in the sky and peering out. This image was so vivid that it has stuck in my mind for mumble mumble years.
Needless to say, I was pretty excited to report my astonishing discovery, but it turns out that the market for associating random lists of nouns was a lot smaller than you would think. What people really want is help remembering names and dates and numbers, which is quite a bit different (try coming up with something outlandish to help remembering say, October 20, 1987). The only thing that really helps with that is the personal computer, which came along mumble years later. That brings me (finally) to the subject of this article, which is using Blackboard Systems to improve your programs.
Real blackboards first appeared in a Philadelphia school in 1809 and were made of pine wood colored with a mixture of egg white and charred potatoes( mmm, can't you smell those potatoes charring in the Franklin stove?) They served pretty much the same purpose as whiteboards do today, as a place to display information that everyone in a room can read.
Software blackboards occupy much the same niche as their real world equivalents. They store data using associative lists in a readily accessible location for the purpose of communicating information between a program's various objects or subprograms. A program may contain more than one blackboard, for instance, if the application allows multiple documents to opened at one time, it might have both an application blackboard and a document blackboard. The application blackboard would be used to store or remember information that pertained to the behavior of the whole application, and the document blackboard's scope would be limited to one document or window.
Some examples of data that might belong in a text editor's blackboard include, the last font chosen, color, font size, number of spaces in a tab, and justification mode. It might be a good idea to store this data in the persistent blackboard for the application so that each new document will inherit the same defaults for these settings.
How useful blackboard data structures can be is not readily apparent until you start using them. It is one of those concepts you keep finding more and more uses for over time. It seems that object oriented technology has brought increased capability for abstraction though information hiding, but there always seems to be a need to access data outside the object metaphor though methods like relational databases or blackboards.
When blackboards or similar structures (like the Windows registry) are used for communication between cooperating programs, it becomes close to the biological concept of stigmergy which is the name given to the communication between social insects facilitated by the structures they build.
