We both rejoice in techniques for making better decisions under uncertainty. Horvitz and I know, for example, that after you choose one of three doors behind which are hidden two goats and a car, and after Monty Hall shows you a goat behind one of the two unchosen doors, the strategy that doubles your chances of winning the car is to switch from taking what's behind the door you first chose to taking what's behind the unopened door. Horvitz's work in Continual Computing ranges from the theoretical to the practical. He considers when it's right to employ idle but also shared resources to advance one's own Continual Computing. We talked about control structures in programming languages and operating systems that might enable Continual Anticiparallelism.
Programmers can pursue parallelism by hand.
Horvitz points to Microsoft Outlook, which does some precomputing already. Another example is SQL Server 2000, which uses an analysis of database workload to precompute partial answers to queries. But Horvitz and I, as do most crusaders, have high ideals. But they could be. As a first step, programmer-assigned priorities could guide the contingent precomputation.