From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/7058 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Robert Dawson Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: The boringness of the dual of exponential Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 09:03:40 -0400 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: Robert Dawson NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1321451303 1668 80.91.229.12 (16 Nov 2011 13:48:23 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:48:23 +0000 (UTC) To: Patrik Eklund , cat group Original-X-From: majordomo@mlist.mta.ca Wed Nov 16 14:48:17 2011 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from smtpx.mta.ca ([138.73.1.4]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1RQfqb-0007sW-D1 for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:48:17 +0100 Original-Received: from mlist.mta.ca ([138.73.1.63]:35293) by smtpx.mta.ca with esmtp (Exim 4.76) (envelope-from ) id 1RQfp3-0006vs-1l; Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:46:41 -0400 Original-Received: from majordomo by mlist.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1RQfp1-0001zQ-HA for categories-list@mlist.mta.ca; Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:46:39 -0400 In-Reply-To: Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:7058 Archived-At: On 14/11/2011 9:36 AM, Patrik Eklund wrote: > Dear Vaughan, > > An excellent remark, once again from your side. > > The general audience of this remark may, however, not identify the > subtlety of these states with respect to modelling of parallel programs > and what apparently now happens on clouds and grids with services and > brokers, and not even to mention customers using these services. > > So perhaps I may suggest to recall e.g. the dining philosophers > paradigm, which was widely used during the early days of CSP > (Communicating Sequential Processes) decades ago. The philosophers go > through only three states, namely, thinking, getting hungry (and thereby > stop thinking), and eating. After eating then go back to thinking, and so > on. They use chopsticks, one by one (in a very non-Asian fashion), and > communicate about using these resources with fellow philosophers around > the table. Simple objectives are e.g. to avoid starvation. My recollection was that there were two versions - "dining philosophers" who had shared access to two forks, either one of which sufficed; and "dining Chinese philosophers" who had shared access to two chopsticks of which both were needed. But perhaps I have got it wrong? Robert [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]