The Art of Synchronisation

Merhaba takipçim. Çok memnun oldum ki şimdi bizim küçük soğuk Savaş bitti. Ve memnunum ki şimdi sana konuşabilirim. Iyi ki varsın 🤍. Bu blog Türkçede yazmak isterdim. Ama bu blog biraz teknik. Yani İngilizce kullanmak zorundayım. Üzgünüm 🙁. 

One of the biggest and most complicated challenges in computer science as well as science in general is the challenge of synchronisation. Weather its to synchronise data or to synchronise two events. To some extent, synchronising data is simpler, but synchronising two events is impossible. 

Two physical events happening in real life can never be synchronised. Its mathematically impossible. Why? Well its mathematically impossible for two values in the real world to be identical. For example let's take two stones which are exactly same weight, shape, size and material and drop them exactly from the same height. They will appear to be dropping at the same time but they are in fact not dropping at the same time. 

To prove this, if you take a clock which is precise upto 1 Seconds. They will appear that they both hit the ground at the same time, but if you take a clock which is precise upto 5 digits of decimal place, there will be a slight difference in the time. 

And this difference increases as the precision of the clock increases. 

In fact it's impossible to even have two identical stones in the first place.

Lets take the weight of the stones. 

The more you increase the precision of a scale and weigh them both, their weights get different and different. 

Despite that, there are events all the time happening in our world that look like they are synchronised. we click on a button and the action is done instantly. we talk on telephone. we move a computer pointer and the computer pointer moves instantly. all these are not in fact synchronised but their differences are so small that that we don’t notice and they all are successful in being “in sync”. 

Actually, humans are like that as well. We all are very very different. some of us are more different than others. some speak same language, some don’t. some have same skin color, some different. and we all think differently. and just like two rocks, its mathematically impossible for two humans to be the same, to think same and to like/dislike same things. 

but with the people we love we like to think that we are “in sync”. and the only way to do that is to fake the synchronisation. The way to do it, is to reduce the differences so much that whatever differences there are look nominal and we don’t even notice them.