[espeed]

Hi Andrew - You went to school for chemistry and chemical engineering. I'm still experimenting with ideas for binary codes of succinct/implicit geometric representations for similarity graph embeddings of non-spatial property data like text and numbers. I keep bumping into the crystallography literature -- the traditional lattice structures and also quasicrystal / fibonacci chain representations. How much of your chemical engineering background have influenced your designs?

[jandrewrogers]

Almost no influence as related to spatial structure; I tend to view spatial structure as an information theoretic manifestation.

On the other hand, chemical engineering had a big influence on how I reason about distributed systems. That discipline is essentially about the design of complex, continuous flow, coordination-free distributed computation systems that are robustly stable in an efficient equilibrium. It maps directly to computer science but has a concept of the problem space that I think is much more refined than what you commonly see in computer science though it is never expressed in computer science terms. But it makes sense, it is chemical engineering’s One Job.

[javajosh]

>robustly stable in an efficient equilibrium

I would like to read more about what this means and how it applies to distributed systems. I have a physics background, but I sense that chemists tend to have a much more intricate (and interesting) conception of "stability".