3 rules of Swarm acronyms
As we move towards Swarm 1.0 I promised there will be regular blog posts which summarise important components, features or innovations in Swarm. In this post, we start with something of utmost importance, acronyms. Swarm being the silly world of acronyms, riddles and mnemonics is a good example to start on.
The concept of a swarm is often heard in the context of emergent order as well as collective intelligence. Swarm intelligence evokes an interconnected colony of entities working together. These colonies are often associated with the ability of the individuals to coordinate action in ways that leads to collective behaviour which is consistent with the idea of the colony as a phenotype with its own rationale. Interestingly, this higher order often emerges from very simple actions in a very localised context.
The frequent use of the term in the realm of network technology testifies how the analogy with distributed systems or peer to peer networks is a good one. Node operators’ local behaviour is profit maximising, yet on a holistic level, the network manifests global requirements benefiting the users. This is also true of Swarm. Through the actions of individual node operators who act on profit motive network level behaviour emerges which benefits the end users.
So while Swarm can also be an abbreviation the resolution of which describes what the acronym stands for, the acronym is also a word on its own right evoking in some real-life sense an analogy with the technical meaning.
From this the three rules of Swarm emerge:
- the abbreviations are ideally acronyms i.e., they also read as an existing word
- this existing word is semantically linked to the acronym’s technical use
- the resolutions (the more the better) are descriptions of the functionality or explain the features
Surely there are extra points for some twist or ambiguous reference or if there are more resolutions of the acronym, each adding info about the concept.
We can now add another two resolutions to Swarm which describe our mission:
- storage for web3: archival and retrieval monetized — referring to our mission to serve as a decentralized storage
- serving web applications with routed messaging — referring to our scope.
Such acronyms introduced over the years are used extensively in Swarm land. Successful applications of the acronym rules are exemplified by disc, swap (swear and swindle), pss or prod. See some of those in the enclosed excerpts from the book.
In these cases the resolutions almost tell a story and list of features. Let these examples serve as a teaser to more detailed explanations in future posts where we will dive deeper in the Book, the blueprint for web3. Stay up to date about new chapter releases and the publishing timeline by visiting https://gateway.ethswarm.org/bzz/latest.bookofswarm.eth/. Subscribe to our mailing list and receive the latest about the Book of Swarm right to your inbox.
Enjoy!
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