16 Designing Reliable Systems
Thomas Schelling, decades before winning the Nobel Prize in economics, posited the following thought experiment:
You are to meet somebody in New York City. You have not been instructed where to meet; you have no prior understanding with the person on where to meet; and you cannot communicate with each other. You are simply told that you will have to guess where to meet and that he is being told the same thing and that you will just have to try to make your guesses coincide.1
When we put this to students today, they can’t even understand how this problem would arise. Surely, you just text them? But back in the day, it was a more familiar conundrum. And the whole point was to see what you could do without being ...
Get Power and Prediction now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
