<random_musings_after_long_conference_day>
What conference, might I
inquire?
I was also making guesses about "moving" a picker from
one tract to another. I wondered if the picker was known a priori (i.e.,
looking for a job) or if the tract simply wanted any available picker. If the
tract wanted a specific picker (the tract owner's son for instance) then in
the real world someone (the application) would have to go and check each tract
until they found him-- this again seems like the hierarchal model more
adequately represents the real world-- while we can all recognize that simply
looping through all of the pickers would be quicker.
Actually, each Picker makes it decisions locally, by
looking at neighboring lots. There is no top-down code telling each
Picker how to move. It is a bottom-up approach to the Vineyard
system. This is for an "XML and Complex System's" tutorial that I
am putting together.
This brings me to my next question(s): were the
"problems" speed oriented or only difficulty oriented? Other than number of
lines, what specifically made it difficult? What did all of those lines
contain?
One
of my requirements is to be able to process each lot (and the
Pickers on the lot) concurrently. The hierarchical approach (as well as
the approach that mandated a specific order) forced the lots to be processed
sequentially. Let me try to give an intuition on why this
is so. Consider three adjacent lots on the Vineyard, with Pickers
on the two outer lots, and no Picker on the inner lot. Each Picker
concurrently makes its decision where to move, based upon local
information (i.e., how many ripe grapes are in neighboring lots).
Suppose that both Pickers elect to move to the inner lot (many ripe grapes
there). Picker 1 removes itself from the lot that it currently resides
on and positions itself onto the inner lot. The two lots are written to
the XSLT result tree. However, Picker 2 is doing the same thing.
Thus, in the result tree we now have two different versions of the inner
lot. The only way that I could see how to do it was to first process
Picker 1, then process Picker 2 using the state that resulted after processing
Picker 1, i.e., process the lots/Pickers sequentially. I hope that I
made some sense in this
description.
Finally, and as an aside, why didn't you choose to use
RDF in the flat model.
An
interesting idea! I shall think about this.
Thanks!
/Roger
