Innovation in Software

I read some pretty weird stuff out there. You might think it odd given I’m all into innovation that I rarely read the likes of Techmeme or Techcrunch – the truth is, there’s little innovation in either.

I want to look at the guys who spend days lying on their backs staring at clouds and thinking to themselves “that cloud looks just like a better way to moderate pseudonymous online discussions”. I prefer artist coders to mathematician coders: they have more interesting things to say. I’ve said this so many times it’s starting to sound like a cliché: I’ve learned more about software from architecture, art and philosophy than I ever have from my University notes on formal methods.

Occasionally, as I scour the websites of the research labs of the World, I encounter something a little bit “special” in the “let’s look at something unique and apply it to the computer industry” niche. This is no exception.

HP Labs have recently published (only appeared in my RSS today, but it’s dated the 12th July) a paper on the election protocol the city of Venice used to elect its ‘Doge’, or Duke/Chief Magistrate, if you prefer. It appears to have been published in the IEEE proceedings for their 20th Computer Security Foundations Symposium which happens to have taken place in Venice, 6th-8th July this year. It could all just be a bit of an in-joke.

However, there are some really interesting ideas in here.

The election of the Doge was – in modern terms – quite absurd. It consisted of 10 rounds of voting, and at the beginning the entire electorate (the Grand Council of oligarchs who were all men over 30) was eligible. Each round was alternately a random lot draw, and then an election. There is an outline of the process given in the paper, and you can see how long it must have taken to elect anybody.

Where the authors (Miranda Mowbray and Dieter Gollman) take it is to show that there are some qualities it would be sensible to consider when designing computer-based election procedures. Specifically they argue that consensus in asynchronous systems, recovery after network partitioning or indeed any scenario where a ‘lead’ has to be taken by some node might be all processes that benefit from such a system. Whilst absurd to us now, it has the virtues of stability and resilience to ‘gaming’ or corruption.

There are some real gems in here as they draw parallels between modern day computer security and this ancient electoral system. Part of the protocol required for a random ballot to ensure that the drawing was fair, was that the person doing the draw would be selected as “the first boy seen after prayer’s at St. Marks” by a particular member of the Council. Mowbray and Gollman describe releasing a young boy into the square at just the right time as a “protocol attack”. They go onto describe the protocol’s arduous and drawn out procedure as “security theatre” – something that anybody who has looked at recent anti-terror legislation is all too familiar with.

They go onto propose a slightly simpler protocol that could be used by computer systems and I’m left with a mind whirring with possible applications. This is the kind of paper that makes me wish I’d got the main Vagueware application online as I can suddenly find myself thinking of applications in search, auctions, community building and more.

This is what I mean when I talk about innovation in software.

Real innovation in this space is not about taking something you’ve seen on the Web and doing it slightly differently like thousands of others. It’s about taking a piece of politics, art, theatre, humanity, and finding something in it – a tiny piece of inspiration – that gives you an idea of how to make software better.