Interaction Automata and the ia2d Interpreter

Abstract

We introduce interaction automata as a topological model of computation and present the conceptual plane interpreter ia2d. Interaction automata form a refinement of both interaction nets and cellular automata models that combine data deployment, memory management and structured computation mechanisms. Their local structure is inspired from pointer machines and allows an asynchronous spatial distribution of the computation. Our tool can be considered as a proof-of-concept piece of abstract hardware on which functional programs can be run in parallel.