round robin

The term round-robin was originally used to describe a document signed by multiple parties in a circle to make it more difficult to determine the order in which it was signed, thus preventing a ringleader from being identified.^[1] The term has evolved to account for any activity in which a group of resources is interacted with singularly and in a circular order.

Round-robin may also refer to a letter with a single author copied and sent to multiple recipients, as when one sends out family news on holidays; this is also called a circular. Gatherings among friends or neighbors where each course is held in a different house, commonly during the holiday season, may also be called a round-robin. This is more commonly referred to as a progressive dinner/supper.^[2]

Origin

The modern use of the term dates from the 17th Century French ruban rond (round ribbon).^[3][4] This described the practice of signatories to petitions against authority (usually Government officials petitioning the Crown) appending their names on a document in a non-hierarchical circle or ribbon pattern (and so disguising the order in which they have signed) so that none may be identified as a ringleader.

This practice was adopted by sailors petitioning officers in the Royal Navy (first recorded 1731).

Usages

Aviation

In aviation, a round-robin flight is a cross-country flight that starts at one airport, travels to several other points for fly-over or touch-and-goes, and returns to the airport of origin. Such flights are often flown for cross-country training purposes.^{[citation needed]}

Computing

In computing, "round-robin" describes a method of choosing a resource for a task from a list of available resources, usually for the purposes of load balancing. For example, this may be used as the method of distributing incoming requests to a number of processors, worker threads, or servers. As the basic algorithm, the scheduler selects a resource pointed to by a counter from a list, after which the counter is incremented and if the end is reached, returned to the beginning of the list. Round-robin selection has a positive characteristic of preventing starvation, as every resource will be eventually chosen by the scheduler, but may be unsuitable for some applications where affinity is desirable, for example when assigning a process to a CPU or in link aggregation.

Sports

In sports, round-robin refers to every player or team in a group or pool taking turns to play one another a set number of times. This may be called the group stage (or phase) of a tournament, prior to the knock-out stage. (See Round-robin tournament for more information).

Literature

In fan fiction, the term commonly denotes a literary work which is written by multiple authors who continually exchange the manuscript.

See also

• Round-robin DNS

References