sixolet: (Default)
sixolet ([personal profile] sixolet) wrote in [personal profile] rax 2012-08-29 08:59 pm (UTC)

From a CS standpoint, I feel like a (standard) hash table might be a bad example of radicle structure. Usually, the data itself can calculate which bucket to go to, and all the data has to agree on how they will do this. Then, when you want to find a piece of data, you ask yourself "if I were this data, what bucket would I be in" and then look there for the data. It feels almost more rhizomatic to me, especially when you get into the realm of distributed hash tables, which have buckets duplicated, so each piece of data knows to go to multiple buckets in case some of the nodes get cut off, the DHT as a whole survives, and can even grow again to incorporate more nodes as they become available. Actually all three of these information flow structures are present in distributed system design, and it would greatly amuse me to start using the D&G terms for them.

A more radicle structure might be the kernel/userspace distinction in an operating system. The kernel is trusted, and ends up mediating almost all interactions between different parts of the system.

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