Ambient calculus
Open-knowledge reference entry
In computer science, the ambient calculus is a process calculus devised by Luca Cardelli and Andrew D. Gordon in 1998, and used to describe and theorise about concurrent systems that include mobility. Here mobility means both computation carried out on mobile devices (i.e. networks that have a dynamic topology), and mobile computation (i.e. executable code that is able to move around the network). The ambient calculus provides a unified framework for modeling both kinds of mobility. It is used to model interactions in such concurrent systems as the Internet.
Since its inception, the ambient calculus has grown into a family of closely related ambient calculi.
Informal description
Ambients
The fundamental primitive of the ambient calculus is the ambient. An ambient is informally defined as a bounded place in which computation can occur. The notion of boundaries is considered key to representing mobility, since a boundary defines a contained computational agent that can be moved in its entirety.
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