arclight on Nostr: I've been pretty good this year, not adopting too many stray books. At least until ...

I've been pretty good this year, not adopting too many stray books. At least until this week.

First up is a $10 special from our local Half-Price Books: "Petri Net Theory and the Modeling of Systems" from 1981. Petri nets are like a complex form of state machine that deals with concurrency, technically described as a bipartite directed multigraph. It's like a guillotine - you put a billionaire in, a head falls in a basket, a body gets tossed in a cart. The basket only holds 5 heads, and the cart can only hold 2000 ponds. If either of those fill up, the guillotine service representative temporarily halts the flow of billionaires through the guillotine until an empty basket or cart arrives.

Anyway, Petri nets can model the concurrent addition of heads and bodies to baskets and carts. They're useful for analyzing or modeling systems that are too complex to be modeled by a simple state machine.