From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 11:48:09 MDT
On Tue, 2002-05-07 at 23:50, Artillo5@cs.com wrote:
>
> This applies to math problems easily, yes. But with DESIGN problems (I am a
> Mechanical Design Engineer), you are solving a system for a large number of
> variables all at the same time, trying to satisfy design criteria. Doesn't
> this count as Human multithreading? I think so.
You have a huge system of equations, but you solve them sequentially
rather than all at once; you solve nothing simultaneously and there is
nothing in the process that could be called true multi-threading. The
only exception to this that I can think of is the case where the set of
equations is not known to be solvable (this happened a lot in Chemical
Engineering when faced with a bevy of differential equations), and so
you try Monte Carlo methods and similar to come up with a reasonable
solution set. But even in this case, the process is really sequential at
its core. Humans can multi-thread, but generally not on a single
cognitive task like what you are talking about.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:54 MST