Possibility Spaces

Well, someone pointed out that I haven't updated this in a while (Hi, Biju!), and I did have a thought...

I was stuck in a middle seat, on a flight from Montreal to Vancouver yesterday, so I wound up playing a bunch of Solitaire on my Palm LifeDrive. I never really cared for the game - I thought it was like crossword puzzles, and entirely mechanical/deterministic. But it's not, and there are a bunch of different choices you make as the game goes on that can determine whether you win or lose (an "undo" function on my game let me back out of several losing games and follow a different path to win).

Anyway, it got me thinking about the different branches you can take in the game (possibility spaces), and ways to weight the winning branches, create a winning algorithm - standard fare for genetic algorithms.

That got me thinking about the possibility spaces for queuing algorithms - trying to maximize throughput of a system using a heuristic based on recurring types of meta data in the job submissions. You can't "undo" queuing decisions, but you can change them over time based on historical results, and optimize them. Not something super-relevant for a production queuing system, since there are usually far more production/political issues that need to be weighed, than strict efficiency concerns.

But that got me thinking about possibility spaces for business deals (and, really, personal interactions of all sorts) - where there is no undo, and the historical conditions from case to case are so different that it's hard to create a heuristic beyond "work with people you trust, and get it agreed to in writing - for everybody's sake".

In retrospect, I suppose that's only really interesting if you're currently weighing different business choices - but at least it's a new blog entry! More to follow.