Followup to: Structural representation of uncertainty, Interference of patterns
In a given scene, two patterns are called independent, if changes in one of them don’t lead to changes in another, if they don’t interfere directly or through short enough sequence of changes in the scene. Independence is conditional on context, so two patterns can be independent in one scene, but not in a different scene, and a change to a third pattern can make them interfere.
Interference makes scene a whole, connects its parts, translates the presence of additional patterns into influence on behavior of existing patterns. Independence allows modular composition of elements of the scene, “keeps everything from happening all at once”. It could also be fundamental to scalable implementation, since it makes interactions between patterns local on each given step.
Groups of patterns, where patterns in each group are mostly independent of patterns in other groups, can function in parallel, so that the whole processes in inference within each group are independent from other processes. Such configurations could be used to compute answers to subproblems, to divide a bigger problem on a collection of smaller ones (using procedural patterns), or to model a bigger system by a collection of models of its parts.
