beating, cascading, and other ways distributed systems respond to synchronicity (and lack thereof)

Impulses along the spokes of a hub-and-spoke network really shouldn't stack on each other or else they overwhelm the hub. Federated Prometheus deployments avoid this problem (termed beating) by hash-assigning a random nanosecond delay to the scraping of each node.

Multiagent systems will often create similar noise-adding solutions to similar problems at the resolution of each individual agent. My favorite example is of improvisational song groups, who use syncopy and chorus to create room for call-and-response.¹ New Orleans jazz does something similar. So does tango.

The practice seems to be a way to create a setup-and-payoff inside a rhythm – set up a trend collaboratively, and seek interest on the margin.

Rhymes with perturbation theory. Rhymes also with coopetition.