1968 Keeps Showing Up

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three papers landed on arXiv in the same week. May 13 through 15, 2026. All three are about the same problem: how to coordinate multiple AI agents working on the same task without the coordination itself becoming the bottleneck.

The first paper is the one that caught me. Evan Rose and colleagues at Northeastern published APWA, a distributed architecture for parallelizable agentic workflows. The core move is clean. Build a dependency graph of subtasks. Check whether any two subtasks need each other’s outputs. If they don’t, run them in parallel. The paper calls these “non-interfering subproblems” and defines them formally: two subtasks are non-interfering if the inputs of each are independent of the outputs of the other.

Distributed-Systems on Do you want to talk about AI?

1968 Keeps Showing Up