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Concurrency

Concorrenza

Concurrency is a system's ability to manage multiple activities in progress over the same period, interleaving or overlapping them. It differs from parallelism: concurrency is dealing with many things at once (even on a single processor, by switching quickly), parallelism is physically doing them at the same instant on multiple compute units. One bartender juggling four orders works concurrently; four bartenders work in parallel.

Definition

How it works

The tools are threads, processes, coroutines and the async/await model: the latter lets a single thread handle thousands of waiting operations (network, disk) by suspending and resuming tasks. The dangers are race conditions and deadlocks; the defenses are locks, message queues and immutable structures. Writing correct concurrent code remains among programming's hardest challenges.

Applications

In AI, concurrency is everywhere: inference servers juggle thousands of simultaneous requests, agents run tool calls in parallel to cut completion time, and applications orchestrate multiple concurrent LLM calls and merge the results. Beyond AI it underpins web servers, databases and responsive interfaces.

History & etymology

The theoretical foundations were laid in the 1960s: Edsger Dijkstra formalized the problems of concurrent programming and introduced semaphores in 1965, along with the famous dining philosophers problem; Tony Hoare contributed the CSP model (Communicating Sequential Processes) in 1978, which still inspires languages like Go. The term comes from the Latin concurrere, to run together.

How it's used in Grace

In Grace's arena duels you and your challenger work concurrently on the same problem: simultaneous activities, compared results. In the scenarios on agents you learn to ask the AI for parallel execution where possible and sequential execution where necessary, the key decision in concurrent design.

Related terms

• Race Condition
• Queue
• Throughput
• Orchestration
• AI Agent

More in Fondamenti AI

• LLM (Large Language Model)
• Token
• Context Window
• Temperature
• AI Hallucination
• Fine-tuning
• RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
• Embedding

Put it into practice

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