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Concurrent Characters

By Clay Breshears (Intel) (194 posts) on March 26, 2009 at 9:26 am

For my monthly SF book discussion group, we just finished Frank Beddor's The Looking Glass Wars. This is a Young Adult fantasy novel that does a reimagining of the classics Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. In Beddor's work, seven-year old Princess Alyss Heart is forced to flee from Wonderland to Victorian England in our world when her evil aunt, Redd, stages a coup to take the crown.  Alyss meets Lewis Carroll and tells him her story about all the things and characters in Wonderland, which he twists (even misspelling Alyss's name) into the classics tales we know. In time-honored story-telling fashion, after thirteen years of searching, Alyss is found by the royal bodyguard, Hatter Madigan, and returned to Wonderland to lead the revolt against the tyrannical Redd and take up her rightful place as the Queen of Hearts.

During our group's discussion of the book, the question of favorite character came up.  Without much thought, I said that I liked one of the minor characters that was leading the revolutionary forces while Alyss was lost in our world: General Doppelgänger. The general had the ability to split himself into two independent people, General Doppel and General Gänger.  These two could split themselves into two copies each (and, I'm told, in the sequel, Seeing Redd, each of these could split in half again making at least eight independent entities at the same time).

The morning after, it struck me just why General Doppelgänger appealed to me.  He's a concurrent character.  Like threads in a concurrent application, he is able split himself and do independent work or lead different groups of soldiers into battle on different fronts.  Back in August 2007, we held the "Reading for Multi-Core Computing" contest where contestants entered examples of parallel computers or parallel computations found in printed material.  All entries were for supercomputers of some form that obviously had multiple processors harnessed to solve a problem.  If anyone had proposed General Doppelgänger during the contest, they would have won a prize.

This all got me to thinking about other examples of concurrent characters.  If you've seen the film or read the graphic novel Watchmen, you know that Dr. Manhattan is able to split himself up in order to work on several things at the same time.  Are there any other examples of fictional characters that can duplicate themselves and perform independent tasks?  If you know of any from any medium (film, TV, comics, books), please leave a comment with details.  No prizes this time except the bragging rights of being first to post any discoveries.

Categories: Parallel Programming

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Comments (4)

March 26, 2009 2:16 PM PDT Mike Stankavich

There's always Smith from The Matrix. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_(The_Matrix)

March 26, 2009 4:30 PM PDT JF

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naruto_Uzumaki with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jutsu_(Naruto)#Shadow_Clone_Technique

March 27, 2009 1:45 PM PDT Gastón C. Hillar Total Points: 4,424 Black Belt

Very nice article. As human beings, we are doing concurrent actions all the time. We walk and we move our arms, we talk and we breath. Multithreading and parallel programming is also easy to explain using the human body.

March 30, 2009 3:20 PM PDT Clay Breshears (Intel) Total Points: 30,126 Black Belt

Over the weekend I thought of Jamie Madrox (Multiple Man; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Madrox) from X-Men comics. Plus, from waaaaay back, there was the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon "The Impossibles" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impossibles_(TV_series) with Multi Man who carried a shield and could multiply himself to quite a few copies. The other two were Fluid Man and Coil Man. Their secret identity was as a rock band, but they only had the three guitarists. (Not sure how that works. I mean, even the White Stripes have a drummer and they have fewer band members than the Impossibles. :-) I'm not sure if I should include Michael Keaton's character in "Multiplicity". He was cloning himslef and really didn't have the power to split himslef and come back to a single person.

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