Re: Just take me out back and shoot me...
"David McClain (as dbm at refined-audiometrics dot com)" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.lisp.lispworks.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Okay… just ran into another AI “Red Herring”. ChatGPT suggested an “exponential backoff” algorithm in the retry of losing threads facing a CAS contention for safe mutation of Actor shared state. Given parallel concurrent execution of an Actor body code by two or more CPU core threads, several may attempt a state mutation by way of BECOME. All message sends and state changes are deferred transactionally to the successful exit of the Actor body code. Ensuring that the state mutation is safe must be mediated by a CAS operation, under which only one thread will succeed. The other threads need to retry their Actor message delivery against the newly updated state. GPT suggested an exponential backoff before the message delivery retries. But this is pointless in this case, unlike network message collisions, because exactly one of the threads will have succeeded in the state mutation. That thread will not be retrying anything - there is no contest between all the players. So there is no point to delaying the retries by the losing threads here. In a communication channel, when two messages arrive at the same time, both messages must be retried, and so random exponential backoff is useful there. So GPT has not hallucinated in this case. It is not asserting an opinion as a fact. But it is injecting a superfluous argument that ends up wasting the time of the human in this interaction, as the human must think about the offered answer before finding it useless. This is a subtle distraction that I have not seen discussed. - DM _______________________________________________ Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users [email protected] http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html