<aside> 📘 TL;DR;
L1 基于 Arweave，这是一种能够永久存储大量数据的区块链（区块纺）协议，具体细节这里不多说了。
AO 是基于 Arweave 的二层应用，在永久存储的基础上，构建起了一个消息的分发和处理机制。AO 负责消息的分发和存储，而不负责提供计算，它对计算节点只有一个要求：确定性。
所以这东西很像是微服务领域的 event-driven，每一个计算节点就相当于一个微服务业务节点，AO 网络会永久存储下所有的消息，而且每一个计算节点的消息都是有序的。所以每一个计算节点的任务，就是按照顺序处理完所有的消息，并且进行相应的输出，输出也是消息，也会被永久存储。
AO 的强大之处就在于，计算节点是分布式 + 并行的，每个人都可以运行自己的计算节点，每一个计算节点会有一个唯一的 process id，然后以这个 process id 为地址进行消息传输。这就为网络提供了近乎无限的并行计算能力。
从 Ethereum 的角度来说，它虽然也有无数个 EVM 在并行运行，但是最终能上链的数据实际上只来自一个 EVM，换句话说，你可以把整个 Ethereum 网络视为一个单线程的程序，这一特性为 EVM 提供了确定性和一致性，但恶果就是运算效率和吞吐极其低下。
AO 的每一个计算节点是并行计算的，而且计算节点是无状态的，并不需要存储，所以回避了分布式下的数据一致性问题。实际上计算机节点的任何时刻的状态，都可以用同一段代码和消息输入进行重现，所以计算节点根本不需要持久化存储任何中间数据。
可以期待，在 Arweave 大存储和 AO 大计算的加持下，AR 生态将会给区块链世界带来飞跃性的基础设施进步。
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Status: Draft 5 Network Version: ao.TN.1
ao?The ao computer is the actor oriented machine that emerges from the network of nodes that adhere to its core data protocol, running on the Arweave network. This document gives a brief introduction to the protocol and its functionality, as well as its technical details, such that builders can create new implementations and services that integrate with it.
The ao computer is a single, unified computing environment (a Single System Image), hosted on a heterogenous set of nodes in a distributed network. ao is designed to offer an environment in which an arbitrary number of paralell processes can be resident, coordinating through an open message passing layer. This message passing standard connects the machine's indepedently operating processes together into a 'web' -- in the same way that websites operate on independent servers but are conjoined into a cohesive, unified experience via hyperlinks.
Unlike existing decentralized compute systems, ao is capable of supporting the operation of computation without protocol-enforced limitations on size and form, while also maintaining the verifiability (and thus, trust minimization) of the network itself. Further, ao's distributed and modular architecture allows existing smart contract platforms to easily 'plug in' to the network, acting as a single process which can send and recieve messages from any other process.
Instead of enforcing one set of choices upon all users of the computing environment, ao is built in a modular form: Allowing users to choose which virtual machines, sequencing models, message passing security guarantees, and payment options work best for them. This modular environment is then unified by the eventual settlement of all messages -- each sharing the same format -- onto Arweave's decentralized data layer. This modularity creates a unified computing environment suiting an extremely wide set of workloads, in which every process can easily transfer messages and cooperate.
ao's core ojective is to enable trustless and cooperating compute services without any practical bounds on scale. This allows for a radically new design space of applications that were not previously possible: Blending the benefits of smart contract applications (services without requiring trust in anything but code), and traditional compute environments (Amazon EC2, etc).
aos -- a decentralized operating system for ao -- allows developers to launch command-line processes that function like smart contracts within its decentralized network. This process is similar to starting a server on a cloud service, but with decentralization and trustless computation as key advantages. These processes operate without being confined to any particular location, enabling seamless user interactions across the network. The outcome is a 'Single System Image'—a unified, global computing platform that transcends physical and scalability limits, collectively used by all participants. Essentially, AO forms a vast, scalable computer where users can interact with any process, promoting a highly collaborative ecosystem.
For users, ao represents a shared computer on which they can execute multiple processes. These processes are not confined to any particular servers or under the dominion of any single individual or group. Once activated, these processes deliver their services with cryptographic security, ensuring unbiased and perpetual operation. This design empowers users with the ability to rely on services that maintain their rights consistently over time, fostering a trustable environment for interaction with the system.
When compared to existing decentralized and distributed computation systems, the ao protocol offers the following features:
ao, applications are built of any number of communicating processes. Inspired by the original actor model (Carl Hewitt, 1973) and Erlang, ao does not allow processes to share memory between one another, but does allow them to coordinate via a native message-passing standard. Each of these processes can then be operated at the full speed of the computing resources that are available, without interfering with one another. By focusing on message-passing ao enables scaling mechanics that are far more similar to traditional web2/distributed systems environments, than traditional smart contracts.ao network do not need to perform any compute at all in order to reach consensus about program state transitions. State is implied 'holographically' by the Arweave-hosted log of messages to the process. Compute costs are then delegated to users who can either calculate their own states, or request execution by nodes of their choosing.ao processes can seamlessly load and execute data of any size directly into their memory and write back to the network. This setup eliminates the typical resource constraints and enables fully parallel execution, dramatically expanding the possibilities for application development beyond the limits of traditional smart contract platforms. Consequently, it opens the door to sophisticated applications requiring extensive data handling and computational resources, such as machine learning tasks and high-compute autonomous agents.ao removes this limitation by allowing contracts to have scheduled 'cron' interactions that automatically wake them up and execute compute at set intervals. Any user, or indeed the process itself, can pay a node to 'subscribe' to a process in order to trigger the evaluation of the compute at the appropriate frequency.ao's core architecture is an open data protocol that anyone can build an implementation of. Everything -- from the sequencers, message passing relayers, and even the virtual machine of the system -- can be swapped out and extended at will. This flexibility will allow the existing smart contracting systems in the Arweave ecosystem (Warp, Ever, Mem, et al) to plug into ao and be able to send and receive messages from the unified network. This will also allow all of these smart contracting systems to share some of the same infrastructure and tooling, making for a more coherent experience of compute on Arweave.ao Architecture in a Nutshell