Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The process continues until all communications have been
completed, at which point each person is asked to report each
message that person received.
Additional Suggestion:
If people can see each other during
this exercise, there may be a tendency to use motions or other
nonverbal hints for folks to determine when they can talk
without interfering with others. To counter this tendency,
participants might sit in a circle facing outward, so they can
not easily see each other.
2.
Consider the popular children's game of tag. In this game,
one person is designated at being “it.” When that person tags
someone else, the tagged person becomes it, so this designa
tion is passed along from one person to another. However, in
the game, the quality of being it passes from one person to
anyone else; there are no constraints on whom the designated
person can tag.
a.
How would the game of tag have to be changed in order to
simulate a tokenring network, in which the tagged person
would correspond to the computer with the token?
b.
In the usual game of tag, one person could be “it” very of
ten, but another might avoid this designation by always
running quickly away from “it.” In a tokenring game of
tag, could any person or computer avoid becoming it?
Explain briefly why or why not.
c.
How might your answer to part b affect how much fun
participants have in a tokenring game of tag?
d.
To what extent does your answer to part b affect the effective
ness of a token ring for communication among computers?
e.
Suppose a computer in a token ring could send the mes
sagepassing authority to any computer rather than to its
neighbor, using the model of a game of tag rather than the
circle model in the usual tokenring network. To what ex
tent might the resulting network work effectively in pro
moting communication among computers? That is, to
what extent could the game of tag be used as a model for
message passing in a computer network? Briefly justify
your answer.
