Among my collection of lesser obsessions (actually, at this point, a stronger obession than my once-compelling interest in the martial arts) is a way of communicating among anything from code fragments to processor cores to entirely separate devices, over what is essentially a mesh network, although it may have hierarchical attributes layered over the peer-to-peer relationships.
This tweet, and the thread in which it is embedded, should serve as a decent entry point into this constellation of ideas/interests, which reaches beyond such networks to include on-the-fly programmable gate arrays, radial bit-slice processors, plug-and-play robotics, and, potentially, a way of thinking about how memes and messages move through social networks.
A term of my own invention (so far as I'm aware) you'll see mentioned is "cascading networks", which refers to an addressing scheme for navigating a netowrk composed of nodes having ports, each dedicated to a single, typically bi-directional connection, either to another node or to code/hardware hosted by a node, inclduing but not limited to the code/hardware of the node itself (its own kernel). The nutshell version is that however many bits are needed to specify a port to receive a message are stripped away from the header when forwarding the message, and the return address appended at the end of the message. Under ideal conditions, this scheme should enable message forwarding with extremely low latency. Making such a network secure and robust would no doubt entail considerably more complication.
