What are the details worth paying attention to in the parallel computer solution AO launched by Arweave?

After many days of warm-up, the Arweave team finally announced the launch of a parallel computer solution called AO at the press conference. It took them a year from conception to development, but its earliest history can be traced back to Arweave’s proposal four years ago. SmartWeave, a smart contract solution based on permanent storage. The choice of these technical solutions is very different from Ethereum or other Ethereum-like networks: Ethereum started with a Turing-complete virtual machine and gradually expanded its territory; while Arweave started with a network that provided permanent storage, and then gradually added computing ability.

There are too many technical topics worthy of comparison and in-depth exploration, and it is unlikely that the Arweave team can fully explain all the technical highlights and ideas in more than an hour. After watching the press conference, I compiled these issues and topics worth paying attention to.

What is AO?

AO is a hyperparallel computer, a decentralized computing environment that allows any number of processes to run in parallel at the same time. Compared with previous decentralized computing systems, AO can achieve both large-scale calculations and verifiable calculations. The core of AO is that it not only increases the number of verifiable calculations, but also realizes verifiable calculations of any magnitude. By building three different sub-networks and using Arweave as the basic layer, it achieves a high degree of parallel processing capabilities and verifiable calculations. Scalability.

Why is it named AO?

Taken from the concept of “Actor Oriented”, the abbreviation is AO.

There is a concurrent computing model in computer science called Actor Model, which is used to design and implement distributed systems, in which the basic unit is “Actor”. Actor Oriented design or programming refers to a design or programming method based on the Actor model. This method is suitable for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems.

Arweave founder Sam Williams believes that AO is a completely different programming paradigm from smart contract systems, and it is basically the best solution for all distributed systems in the world and the Web2 era.

An example given to me by GPT 4: It can be compared to an actor in a theater performance. In a drama, each actor plays a role, and they act independently, interacting with other actors through dialogue (messages), but they do not share each other’s internal state (private state), each actor can only observe other actors’ actions (received messages) to react.

Add an interesting fact: The title of the paper that proposed the Actor Model in 1973 was “A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence”, which was for the purpose of studying artificial intelligence.

What parts does AO consist of?

AO consists of three subnets, namely Messenger Unit, Scheduler Unit, and Compute Unit. The abbreviations are MU, SU, and CU. MU is responsible for receiving and processing information; SU is used for scheduling and sorting information; CU is used for processing calculations.

What is the relationship between AO and Arweave?

“AO is actually an open and flexible data protocol for storing calculation logs on Arweave’s protocol. It is not a permanent ledger, nor is it a network itself.”

As a decentralized computing environment, AO uses Arweave’s scalable on-chain storage as its permanent host to store data during operation. AO can allow any number of parallel processes to run simultaneously and coordinate with each other through message passing, similar to how computers in data centers and the Internet work together by sending packets of data.

In short, AO is built on the basic layer of Arweave and uses the on-chain storage function provided by Arweave to realize the persistent storage needs of its decentralized computing environment.

What is the relationship between AOS and AO? What kind of programming language is Lua?

AO is a parallel computer architecture, and AOS is a specific operating system based on this parallel computer solution. Developers can use Lua language to develop applications (write smart contracts) in AOS.

Lua is an easy-to-learn high-level language that is very concise and easy to use. Coincidentally, I wrote some scripts in Lua almost 4 years ago, and it is indeed an easy programming language to get started with. At that time, I had zero knowledge of Lua, but I needed to use the automation tool HammerSpoon to implement some functions for obtaining prices and information. I completed it within a few days. It’s even easier if GPT helps.

What are the applications of AO?

At present, the community has been organized to develop two applications, namely the decentralized exchange Bark and the decentralized stable currency protocol astro, which can be compared to Uniswap and MakerDAO. Bark has been launched on the test network, and astro will be made public later.

Outprog, the founder of EverVision, also appeared at the press conference and was frequently mentioned by Sam. The decentralized trading platform Permaswap they developed was long before the AO project was established, and there will be opportunities to further develop and expand it under the AO structure.

Will AO be iteratively updated soon?

Sam said he expects only Bitcoin-style updates to be needed in the future (i.e. very infrequently). Over time, users’ core functionality and rights will remain unchanged with minor upgrades. There’s no “trust me, brother” road map here. There is only one complete and transparent protocol that you can audit and decide whether to use for yourself.

Does AO have independent tokens?

This part of the information has not yet been made public.