dynamicswithout

Dynamicswithout is a framework for describing and simulating dynamical processes in which evolution is driven by discrete events rather than a single global clock. It emphasizes locality, causality, and asynchronous updates, allowing systems to change state and trigger further events as they occur.

Origin and scope: The term appears in discussions of asynchronous dynamics in computer science and complex systems, where traditional time-stepped models can be inefficient or misrepresent interactions. Dynamicswithout functions as a conceptual approach and as a pattern for building simulations.

Core concepts: Entities hold state; events carry information about state changes; a scheduler dispatches events according to rules. The framework supports discrete and continuous state, irregular event timing, and mechanisms for causality, priority, and conflict resolution.

Applications: Network propagation, multi-agent systems, epidemiology, traffic modeling, robotics, and virtual environments. Benefits include scalable performance for highly asynchronous processes, better fidelity for sporadic events, and easier composition of modular subsystems.

Implementations: Dynamicswithout can be realized as libraries in Python, Rust, or JavaScript, providing data models, event queues, and reproducible seeding. Common patterns include event-driven state machines, reaction graphs, and asynchronous simulators.

Reception and evaluation: It is praised for flexibility and natural representation of real-world processes but criticized for potential nondeterminism and debugging difficulty. Tooling and standardization remain active areas.

See also: asynchronous computing, event-driven simulation, dynamical systems, agent-based modeling.