Re: Abduction and Introspection

Posted by thompnickson2 on Jan 25, 2020; 7:56pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Abduction-and-Introspection-tp7594386p7594399.html

Thanks, Marcus,

 

Am I correct that all of your examples fall with in this frame;

 

I keep expecting you guys to scream at me, “Of course, you idiot, self-perception is partial and subject to error!  HTF could it be otherwise?”   I would love that.  I would record it and put it on loop for half my colleagues in psychology departments around the world. 

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2020 12:16 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction and Introspection

 

Nick writes:

 

 As software engineers, what conditions would a program have to fulfill to say that a computer was monitoring “itself

 

It is common for codes that calculate things to periodically test invariants that should hold.   For example, a physics code might test for conservation of mass or energy.   A conversion between a data structure with one index scheme to another is often followed by a check to ensure the total number of records did not change, or if it did change that it changed by an expected amount.   It is also possible, but less common, to write a code so that proofs are constructed by virtue of the code being compliable against a set of types.   The types describe all of the conditions that must hold regarding the behavior of a function.    In that case it is not necessary to detect if something goes haywire at runtime because it is simply not possible for something to go haywire.  (A computer could still miscalculate due to a cosmic ray, or some other physical interruption, but assuming that did not happen a complete proof-carrying code would not fail within its specifications.)

A weaker form of self-monitoring is to periodically check for memory or disk usage, and to raise an alarm if they are unexpectedly high or low.   Such an alarm might trigger cleanups of old results, otherwise kept around for convenience. 

 

Marcus

 

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