Question: What is the most interesting thing you have found in your work with computers?

Sarah Mount answered on 15 Mar 2010:

Well, I think the most interesting thing for me is that it’s so hard for computers to do more than one thing at a time. Humans are absolutely brilliant at this. I bet when you’re at school you can listen to the teacher, think about what’s on TV tonight, take notes and do all sorts of other things all at once! We would call this “concurrency” and it comes so naturally to people that we just take it for granted. For computers though, even the new “dual core” and “quad core” ones, it’s still difficult for computers to manage concurrency well. We can do it, but programs that use concurrency tend to be very error prone and it’s very difficult to figure out what they will do before you run them.