Stochastic Process Creation

Abstract

In many areas of computer science entities can "reproduce", "replicate", or "create new instances". Paramount examples are threads in multithreaded programs, processes in operating systems, and computer viruses, but many others exist: procedure calls create new incarnations of the callees, web crawlers discover new pages to be explored (and so "create" new tasks), divide-and-conquer procedures split a problem into subproblems, and leaves of tree-based data structures become internal nodes with children. For lack of a better name, I use the generic term systems with process creation to refer to all these entities. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.