Better algorithms could decrease the serial burden of a thought and allow more thoughts to occur in serial rather than parallel
Shouldn’t that be “allow more thoughts to occur in parallel rather than serial”? Turning a thought from multiple parallel sub-tasks to one serial task increases the serial burden of that thought, rather than decreasing it.
The idea here is that you use parallelism to implement operations like caching which can decrease the number of serial steps required for a thought, so that more of them can occur one after another. In the simplest case, if you were already using a serial processor to emulate parallel computers, adding parallel power increases serial depth because you need no longer burn serialism to emulate parallelism.
Oh, so diverting serial processing cycles to get serial depth instead of getting half the depth over two independent tasks. I thought the sentence was saying something else entirely: that a better algorithm does the same thing except with higher serial depth over fewer processes.
I may have found a minor problem on page 50:
Shouldn’t that be “allow more thoughts to occur in parallel rather than serial”? Turning a thought from multiple parallel sub-tasks to one serial task increases the serial burden of that thought, rather than decreasing it.
The idea here is that you use parallelism to implement operations like caching which can decrease the number of serial steps required for a thought, so that more of them can occur one after another. In the simplest case, if you were already using a serial processor to emulate parallel computers, adding parallel power increases serial depth because you need no longer burn serialism to emulate parallelism.
Oh, so diverting serial processing cycles to get serial depth instead of getting half the depth over two independent tasks. I thought the sentence was saying something else entirely: that a better algorithm does the same thing except with higher serial depth over fewer processes.