Talk:Embarrassingly parallel

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[edit] Name origin

Why is it called embarrsingly? What's the reasoning behind the word use? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.25.246.40 (talk • contribs) 17:44, 23 June 2005 (UTC)

Maybe it's started as a criticism on a particular problem that might have been used as a benchmark. This is just second-guessing tho. As massively parallel tasks are the easiest to parallelizize (by definition), it doesn't get much respect from anyone if you have a computer that's capable of doing that. 62.220.237.66 13:30, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Probably because it refers to problems that are so easy to parallelize, that it would be very embarrassing if your parallel computing system failed to do so. Compare "embarrassingly obvious". --Piet Delport 18:25, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Game-tree search

I'm not sure I agree that game-tree search in artificial intelligence is in general (or even frequently) embarassingly parallel; while minimax is, alpha-beta is definitely not. --Kenta2 12:30, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

You are correct. Only the simplest implementations are. Any technique which uses gathered knowledge to search more effectively presets parallelistation problems. (Alpha-beta is an example). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.193.175.91 (talk • contribs) 10:46, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pleasingly Parallel

I've also seen a growing use of the alternative term "pleasingly parallel", as a euphemism for this term, since "embarrassingly" can have negative connotations. -- Bovineone 17:59, 14 April 2006 (UTC)