fostel@ncsu.UUCP (09/19/83)
Sheesh. Every seems so excited about whether a parallel machine is or will lead to fundamentally new things. I agree with someones comment that conceptually time-sharing and multi-programming have been conceptually quite parellel "virtual" machines for some time. Just more and cheaper of the same. Perhaps the added availability will lead someone to have a good idea or two about how to do something better -- in that sense it seems certain that something good will come of proliferation and popularization of parallelism. But for my money, there is nothing really, fundamentally different. Unless it is non-determinism. Parallel system tend to be less deterministic then their simplex brethern, though vast effort are usually expended in an effort to stamp out this property. Take me for example: I am VERY non- deterministic (just ask my wife) and yet I am also smarter then a lot of AI programs. The break thru in AI/Arch will, in my non-determined opinion, come when people stop trying to sqeeze paralle systems into the more restricted modes of simplex systems, and develop new paradigms for how to let such a system spred its wings in a dimension OTHER THAN performance. From a pragmatic view, I think this will not happen until people take error recovery and exception processing more seriously, since there is a fine line between an error and a new thought .... ----GaryFostel----