Re: [Gzz] Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Starting Point for Collab Tool

[Tuomas Lukka]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 02:54:24PM -0800, Eric Armstrong wrote:
> All in all, this is really good news. I understand that refactoring
> puts things in a bit of flux at the moment, but the result of it all
> will be an excellent segmentation that lets Storm get used in a
> variety of projects. It's really rather thrilling.

Very glad to hear it ;)

> On the mathematical side, I woke up the other day and realized
> that if I want to track who ever wrote anything, I'll need an identifier
> big enough to identify anyone who has ever lived (for example,
> Shakespeare), and to identfiy who makes changes, I'll need one
> big enough to identify anyone who ever *will* live. Now, that
> identifier is starting to get pretty huge.
> 
> Then, I'll need an identifier for every paragraph in every document
> on every computer that ever was or will be constructed. These
> are really big numbers now. And when someone corrects a typo
> on some page somewhere, that paragraph will need to be versioned,
> and the huge-long-identifier of the perpetrator will need to be stored,
> along with a date, just to track that one-character change.
> 
> I began to think that, mathematically, perhaps true collaboration in
> the form of "global knowledge sharing" was impossible, and that
> the best we could do would be some sort of "local cluster", within
> which true sharing could go on.
> 
> I look forward to the results of any thinking you guys have done on
> this subject, or any research you've managed to find that deals with
> it.

Umm, this is not really true. 

First, you don't need an identifier for every paragraph in every document
on every computer; every *character* in every document will do.

We use Xanalogical storage with 160 bits for each sequence of characters
entered during one session.

160 bits may seem like little but when you start doing the math, you'll
find that it's actually quite immense: 160 bits = 10^48. This is a huge number.
There are about 10^9 people living. The earth's mass is 10^25 kg.

Of course, due to the birthday paradoc you need to count that down a little,
but it's still a LOT. And if you double the length at some point, getting
320 bits, you have to remember that you don't get just double the amount:
for each identifier you used to have you now have the same total number that
you used to have.

So, it shouldn't be a problem ;)

        Tuomas