Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems (Mit Press Series in Artificial Intelligence)
"The model described is more powerful than previous ones because it provides for dynamic growth and reconfiguration, and it uses an open systems approach. This extension is essential for work in artificial intelligence and related areas where it is difficult, in typical applications to make advanced estimates of the computational resources required. The Feynman-like diagrams Agha introduces are a particularly good technique for illustrating the interactions in asynchronous, concurrent systems. They should find increasing use in serious studies of the problems accompanying parallelism. Overall, this is a seminal piece of work, carefully tied to previous research." John H. Holland, University of Michigan