Latency

Latency in the smart / connected world is what frustrates us the most. You click and nothing happens... for a while... The phone is coming out of the dormant state of the data connection... The occupancy sensor is trying to reach for the Cloud to determine whether it should turn on the lights... Or simply the uplink of the ADSL connection is saturated and the requests are buffered waiting for the green light. I visited this subject some time ago...

Lag can simply make it impossible to stabilize the circuit. If the reaction is too slow it may simply be wrong. Because when delayed, is is no longer the proper reaction to fast changing conditions.

Exactly this was causing the robotic arms linked to the brain's motor cortex were failing. They reactions were too late. Re-linking the arms to the posterior parietal cortex allowed them to reduce the overall latency of the system to the level that guarantees timely reactions.

We live in a software defined world. Which means it is full of buffers, layers and lags. The hourglass appeared on a computer screen 25 years ago. And is still present. When software - based systems dissolve into the environment that surrounds us, we expect there will be no latency between events / actions and reactions. This is a hard problem to solve. But one, when properly solved, makes a day-and-night difference. We want the software - defined world to perform as fast as the physical, hard wired, we are used to.

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