Hierarchical Brains
BrainShop allows you to create as many brains as you need, with a single account. Each brain can be either a root or a child of another. A child brain inherits all of the cells of its parent. Where there are same cells across child/parent brains, the child overrides the parent.
What is the significance of such a hierarchical structure?
It enables you to reuse cells across brains and maximize the returns on the time and money you invest. Imagine you create a virtual robot, iBot, with BrainShop and deploy it with a mobile phone app. The app is so popular that you decide to deploy it on Web too. Then this is a problem, while the most cells are applicable to both phone and Web, some need to be customized for each deployment respectively.
In addition, what if you consider setting up a Facebook profile and integrate it with Facebook chat box? It's OK to maintain three brains for each deployment but obviously that's not an efficient way.
A set of brains in hierarchical structure address the issue. You just need to create four brains and organize them as below.
Example 1. Hierarchical brains
- My Brains
- iBot
- Phone
- Web
The root brain, iBot, contains all of the common cells that are shared by all deployment. The child brains, Phone, Web and Facebook, contain the cells specific to each deployment respectively. By doing this, you don't have to repeat the same cell three times any more.
Tips
You can move cells between brains. To do so,
- Choose the source brain.
- Select the cells you want to move.
- Click (operations) icon.
- Select Modify cells operation.
- Click Execute button.
- Click Brain and select the target brain from the list.
- Click Next button.