Brad Wyble wrote: > > Right, it might at that. Even if you disregard the wetware > design of the > brain, it's still important to consider that at the functional level, > evolution decided that restricting full scale executive > function to 1 primary stream was the best way to go.
It is probably a pragmatic issue. Given the general architecture of the brain, there would be a really ugly cache coherence and resource sharing type problem that kind of makes it impossible to have two or more fully independent threads running across the entire brain. The brain doesn't really have the hardware to support state versioning, context-localized storage, and other things that make true multithreading work. Basically, the processes would HAVE to step on each other. We can program around this problem easily in software, but it requires doing things that have no real analog in wetware. This will be one of the clear advantages of silicon over evolutionary wetware; we can design systems and protocols capable of fine-grained parallel resource sharing between contexts. But I agree, it would definitely be useful to have these things in wetware. :-) Cheers, -James Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
