Parallel Worlds

Exploring "Multiple Worlds" in Parallel

We examine computing alternative solutions to a problem in parallel to improve response time. Problems with exploring multiple alternatives in parallel include (1) side-effects and (2) combinatorial explosion in the amount of state which must be preserved. These are solved by process management and an application of ‘‘copy-on-write’’ virtual memory management. The side effects resulting from in...

TARDiS: Transactional Storage with Parallel Worlds

Geo-replication is an increasingly common requirement for computing services which desire low latency and high availability across the globe. In these services, replicas serve requests locally and independently. The lack of synchronisation across sites guarantees good performance but often comes at the cost of consistency; many recent research efforts, as a result, exhibit a race to redefine co...

Back to the Future: Surrogates, Mirror Worlds, and Parallel Universes

Parallel Worlds of Public and Commercial Bioactive Chemistry Data

The availability of structures and linked bioactivity data in databases is powerfully enabling for drug discovery and chemical biology. However, we now review some confounding issues with the divergent expansions of public and commercial sources of chemical structures. These are associated with not only expanding patent extraction but also increasingly large vendor collections amassed via diffe...

Adrian Miroiu WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS

It is sometimes argued that possible worlds are too rich. Indeed, for every sentence φ and every world w, either φ is true at w, or ¬φ is true at w. Possible worlds leave nothing unsettled: for any question one may ask, there is always an answer, yes or no. My view goes along the opposite side. I take possible worlds to be incredibly poor, and I think that a good deal can be added to them. The ...