Antiobjects
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The notion of antiobjects is a computational metaphor useful to conceptualize and solve hard problems by swapping computational foreground and background. Similar to optical illusions based on potential confusion of background versus foreground perceptions, antiobjects are the inverse of what we perceive to be the computational objects. If we implement, as part of a Pacman game, a ghost we are tempted to think of the necessary behavior associated with the ghost object; if we simulate the behavior of an air bubble in a water glass we are tempted to think of how the bubble object should behave; if we build a soccer simulation we are tempted to think of how the soccer player objects should interact with the ball and other player objects. Antiobjects turn things on their head. In the case of Pacman we put the main computation into the maze; to simulate the behavior of an air bubble we put the main computation into the water; to create a collaborative soccer game we put the main computation into the soccer field.
Within object-oriented programming the metaphor of objects can go too far by making us try to create objects that are too much inspired by the real world. This is a serious problem, as a resulting system may be significantly more complex than it would have to be, or worse, will not work at all. Antiobjects are a kind of object that appear to essentially do the opposite of what we generally think the object should be doing. As a Gedankenexperiment antiobjects allow us to literally think outside the proverbial box or, in this case outside the object. Putting computation into antiobjects, e.g., the maze, the water, and the soccer field, can substantially simplify hard problems in Artificial Intelligence and simulations. Moreover, the mapping of computation from a small number of objects to a much larger number of typically homogenous antiobjects can by employed to parallelize computation in ways that it can be executed on parallel architectures such as GPUs and multi-core CPUs with very little overhead.
[edit] References
Repenning, A., Collaborative Diffusion: Programming Antiobjects. in OOPSLA 2006, ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, (Portland, Oregon, 2006), ACM Press.
