Do you think that thinking explicitly about distributed systems (in the theoretical computer science sense) could be useful for having different frames or understanding of the tradeoffs? Or are you mostly using the idea of distributed systems as an intuitive frame without seeing much value in taking it too seriously?
If I may be so bold, the answer should be a guarded yes.
A snag is that the correct theory of what John calls ‘distributed systems’ or ‘Time’ and what theoretical CS academics generally call ‘concurrency’ is as of yet not fully constructed. To be sure, there are many quite well-developed theoretical frameworks—e.g. the Pi calculus or the various models of concurrency like Petri nets, transitions systems, event structures etc. They’re certainly on my list of ‘important things I’d like to understand better’.
Our world, and our sensemaking of it, is fundamentally concurrent. If we had the ‘correct’ theory of concurrency and we would be able to coherently combine it with decision theory under uncertainty that would be very powerful.
I agree with Self-Embedded Agent that there’s likely powerful frames for thinking about distributed compute which have not yet been discovered, and existing work may hint toward those. That’s the sort of thing which is probably not useful for most researchers to think about, but worth at least some thinking about.
There’s a shared core to distributed models which I do think basically-all technical researchers in the field should be familiar with. That’s best picked up by seeing it in a few different contexts, and theory of distributed systems is one possible context to pick it up from. (Some others: Bayes nets/causality, working with structured matrices, distributed programming in practice.)
Do you think that thinking explicitly about distributed systems (in the theoretical computer science sense) could be useful for having different frames or understanding of the tradeoffs? Or are you mostly using the idea of distributed systems as an intuitive frame without seeing much value in taking it too seriously?
If I may be so bold, the answer should be a guarded yes.
A snag is that the correct theory of what John calls ‘distributed systems’ or ‘Time’ and what theoretical CS academics generally call ‘concurrency’ is as of yet not fully constructed. To be sure, there are many quite well-developed theoretical frameworks—e.g. the Pi calculus or the various models of concurrency like Petri nets, transitions systems, event structures etc. They’re certainly on my list of ‘important things I’d like to understand better’.
Our world, and our sensemaking of it, is fundamentally concurrent. If we had the ‘correct’ theory of concurrency and we would be able to coherently combine it with decision theory under uncertainty that would be very powerful.
Two answers:
I agree with Self-Embedded Agent that there’s likely powerful frames for thinking about distributed compute which have not yet been discovered, and existing work may hint toward those. That’s the sort of thing which is probably not useful for most researchers to think about, but worth at least some thinking about.
There’s a shared core to distributed models which I do think basically-all technical researchers in the field should be familiar with. That’s best picked up by seeing it in a few different contexts, and theory of distributed systems is one possible context to pick it up from. (Some others: Bayes nets/causality, working with structured matrices, distributed programming in practice.)