Module modality_mutation_plane::protocol

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The modality mutation plane is comprised of a tree of communicating participants sharing information about mutators and mutations using this protocol.

§Participants

  • A participant has a globally unique identifier
  • A participant may have zero to many child participants.
  • The root participant has zero parents; all other participants have one parent
  • A participant may manage zero to many mutators.

§Mutators

  • A mutator has a globally unique identifier
  • A mutator may only be managed by a single participant
  • A mutator may have zero to many “staged” mutations
    • These are not-yet-actuated mutations
    • Staged mutations are only actuated when their triggering conditions are met
    • Staged mutations may be canceled
  • A mutator may have zero to one active mutation
    • This is the most-recently-actuated mutation
    • A mutation is considered no longer active when either the mutator is reset or a new mutation is actuated at the same mutator.

§Mutations

  • A mutation has a globally unique identifier
  • A mutation has a map of zero to many parameters (key-value pairs)
  • A mutation optionally has an associated set of triggering conditions and CRDT-like state tracking of those conditions
  • A mutator and its managing participant are responsible for ensuring that a mutation is only ever actuated zero or one times.

§Messages

Messages typically travel in a single direction - either from the leaf/descendant participants towards the root, or from the root/ancestor participants towards the leaf/descendants.

When a participant receives a rootwards message from its children, it is expected to propagate the message to its parent.

When a participant receives a leafwards message from its parent either:

  • The message specifically only has meaning for the current participant or its managed mutators and must be handled locally and not propagated. E.G. ClearMutationsForMutator, ChildAuthOutcome
  • The message may be relevant to some other participant, and must be propagated to children.

The exception to these rules is UpdateTriggerState, which travels in both directions.

When a participant receives this message, it attempts to update its internal triggering state for that mutation. If anything changed in the internal state as a result of incorporating the contents of the message, an UpdateTriggerState message should be sent to the participant’s parent and any children.

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