Schrödinger's Cat and RCU (Well, Structured Procrastination, Actually) 43
davecb writes "Paul E. McKenney, one of the Linux RCU implementors, addresses the problem of synchronization using structured deferral on, what else, Mr Schrödinger's famous cat. Courtesy of deferral/procrastination, the cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. 'In this example, Schrödinger would like to construct an in-memory database to keep track of the animals in his zoo. Births would of course result in insertions into this database, while deaths would result in deletions. The database is also queried by those interested in the health and welfare of Schrödinger's animals. Schrödinger has numerous short-lived animals such as mice, resulting in high update rates. In addition, there is a surprising level of interest in the health of Schrödinger's cat, so much so that Schrödinger sometimes wonders whether his mice are responsible for most of these queries. Regardless of their source, the database must handle the large volume of cat-related queries without suffering from excessive levels of contention. Both accesses and updates are typically quite short, involving accessing or mutating an in-memory data structure, and therefore synchronization overhead cannot be ignored.'"
So simple now! (Score:5, Funny)
I know! Let's explain the workings of a deterministic computational system using analogies to quantum mechanics! Everyone find quantum mechanics clear and intuitive.
Slashdot Translation (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot Translation: It's similar to how an article exists in a superposition of both interesting and uninteresting at the same time, so long as no one reads it. Rather than RTFA and collapse the superposition, we can simply read the quantumly entangled comments to determine the degree of interest in accordance with our groupthink.
This had to be done (Score:3, Funny)
He can be both ignorant and knowledgeable at same time until measured.
And if in an entangled pair of students one just copies notes off other, measuring one of them will immediately collapse the wave function of another.