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[ysabel]

(For context: in a couple of places, my avatar is a nigh-infinite number of six-inch-tall fairies with a hivemind sort of consciousness. This particular quote is from fenton's hangout/social MUX.)

fenton pages: Especially during debug/runtime. I think that's my new metaphor for heavily OO code that has high object dynamism and loosely coupled, task/

Comments

[gconnor]

"nigh infinite?"

"Hey you million tiny debs over there! Don't fly too close, you'll form a singularity. Crowded enough here as it is."

Anyway as with any cluster system you will probably be constrained by bandwidth between the "nodes". Ever tried playing "telephone" with a chain of 10 people? Try it with several hundred faeries, all of whom are as likely to change the message for fun as forget it right away.

[ysabel]

In the one place where I've actually RPed the Debs, they function more as neurons or small computational units than as relays. Each Deb is not herself sentient, and it takes a cluster of at least sixteen to really start to have the Debs consciousness aware of herself. With a cluster that small, the awareness is very limited and missing memories and vocabulary, though

[ysabel]

And yes, even at their best, the Debs are sort of distractable and ADDish.

[ysabel]

That said, the bandwidth-per-node is higher than the compute power per node, since they use some form of gestalt consciousness to communicate, and don't have that much compute power per fairy...

[flwyd]

My OS professor had a presentation about processor growth using farming as a metaphor.

You start out with a field and a plow. Your field gets bigger and you get a tractor. Your field gets bigger and you get a bigger tractor. Your field gets bigger and you get an even bigger tractor. Your field gets bigger, but bigger tractors are unwieldy and expensive. So you take two tractors and stick them together.

Your field gets bigger, so you attach some more tractors to your existing tractor set. Your field gets bigger and you realize it's hard to work with 16 tractors, so you get a 32 smaller tractors and let them run independently.

Your field gets bigger and you consider replacing your 32 tractors with 16,000 spoons...

So when the myriad cluster of fairies are not solving important problems they can all use their spoons to eat pudding.

[ysabel]

I'm thinkin' that eating pudding isn't the first thing they'd think to do with their spoons.

[l_l_u_w_d]

Now it's even more Fantasia, as I posted on fenton's LJ, since he mentions Night on Bald Mountain over here in your post. :P