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Humanity as a single, very big piece of multithreaded software: Minds are processes, reality is shared memory. Crashes happen under suitably bad conditions (e
by sz 16y ago
Humanity as a single, very big piece of multithreaded software:
Minds are processes, reality is shared memory. Crashes happen under suitably bad conditions (e.g. WWII).
I don't see how this per se offers any real insight. You can apply the analogy to almost anything.
- tomjen3 16y agoActually because you can apply it to anything, it means that the things we learned in CS class are that much more useful.
- dpapathanasiou 16y agoWell, Douglas Adams thought of it, too. In HHGG, the Earth is just a massive computer for calculating the question to the answer of life the universe and everything. All the biological components are merely instances and sub-processes spawned by the main program.
- keefe 16y agoargh and it's a crappy analogy honestly. There's no real deadlocks as far as cycles of dependencies on critical resources. It's basically saying the stock market is a giant distributed system with a bunch of independent agents, which erm it is... this analogy to threading just doesn't add anything, it's just the author's model for agents acting concurrently, threading is a low level OS thing not the fundamentals of concurrent action.