[FRIAM] Abduction and Introspection

[Marcus Daniels]

I would say the problem of debugging (or introspection if you insist)  is like if you find yourself at some random place, never seen before, and the task it do develop a map and learn the local language and customs.  If one is given the job of law enforcement (debugging violations of law), it is necessary to collect quite a bit of information, e.g. the laws of the jurisdiction, the sensitivities and conflicts in the area, and detailed geography.  In haphazardly-developed  software, learning about one part of a city teaches you nothing about another part of the city.   In well-designed software, one can orient oneself quickly because there are many easily-learnable conventions to follow.    I would say this distinction between the modeler and the modeled is not that helpful.   To really avoid bugs, one wants to have metaphorical citizens that are genetically incapable of breaking laws.   Privileged access is kind of beside the point because in practice software is often far too big to fully rationalize.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of "thompnickson2 at gmail.com" <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Date: Saturday, January 25, 2020 at 11:57 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction and Introspection

Thanks, Marcus,

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

[cid:image001.png at 01D5D37F.F53D72D0]
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
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/


From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2020 12:16 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
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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