From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2006-09-05T07:05:58+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] good article on threads

Rick DeNatale wrote:
> On 9/3/06, David Vallner <david@vallner.net> wrote:
> 
>> Michal Suchanek wrote:
>> > "To offer another analogy, a folk definition of insanity is to do the
>> > same thing over and over again and expect the results to be different.
>> > By this definition, we in fact require that programmers of
>> > multithreaded systems be insane. Were they sane, they could not
>> > understand their programs."
>> >
>>
>> As Rick DeNatale pointed out, the folk analogy is nonsense. The real
>> world just isn't deterministic.
> 
> 
> Well, as far as we can tell, but it's a topic of debate.  Einstein
> didn't much like the idea of God playing dice with the universe.
> Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't.
> 
> But can we tell the difference? <G>

Exactly.

I never liked that definition because it implicitly ignored things
that are low-probability.

The lower probability an event is, the harder it is to distinguish
it from "impossible."

If an event has probability 0.001, I would look for it 500 times
or so before I started "seriously" looking for it. That's more than
enough to classify me as insane.


Hal