On: The stock market as a single, very big piece of multithreaded software

[sz]

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.

[dpapathanasiou → sz]

Well, 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 → sz]

argh 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.

[tomjen3 → sz]

Actually because you can apply it to anything, it means that the things we learned in CS class are that much more useful.