Deterministic Computation
Full Title
Determinism in the [Computation]] of a result is a fundamental thesis of computer science, but must be viewed as an aspirational, but unachievable goal.
Context
The human species currently thrives better with randomness in nature than any other land animal.[1] Other have survived the vicissitudes of nature by finding niche environments where they can hide, but humans have survived in disparate climates by discovering means by which to adapt to change. A Harvard Business Review put it this way[2]The success of Homo sapiens was no fluke. The greatly enlarged brain of the species made survival in the unpredictable environment of Africa’s vast Savannah Plain possible. Much of that brain’s programming was already in place, an inheritance from prehuman ancestors. But eventually, thanks to natural selection, other “circuits” developed, specifically those that helped human beings survive and reproduce as clan-living hunter-foragers.
Much of the large and expensive brain of the human was devoted to calculating possibilities: where the next prey would most likely be found, or where the next place to find better hunting might exist. Nothing in life is certain, but until recently it was thought that certainty could be found in the models of the physical world. At the beginning of the 20th century these models all exhibited one thing, certainty, except for one law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which was considered an anomaly, and then came Heisenberg in 1925. The result of that is described below.
The Problem
The Uncertainty principle states that the position and speed of a particle cannot both be known any better than the following:
Δp x Δq ≥ h
It is seen that both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, they exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time — the two concepts are different. It is true that it might be postulated that two separate entities, one having all the properties of a particle and the other all the properties of wave motion, combined in someway to form "light." But such are unable to bring about the intimate relation between the two entities which seems required by the experiment evidence. As a matter of fact, it is experimentally certain only that light sometimes behaves as if it possessed of the attributes Of a particle, but there is no experiment which proves that it possesses all the properties of particle; similar statements hold for matter and wave motion. The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiments lead us to form — the one particles, the other of waves — are both incomplete an have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases. It is a trite saying that "analogies cannot be pushed too far," yet they may be justifiably used to describe things for which our language has no words. Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language.[3]
Typically the effort to become efficient inevitably results in systems that are less resilient. The very existence of humanity is due to their resilience.
Solutions
Given that absolute certainty is not possible, what can, and should, be done to get reliable, low cost computing.
References
- ↑ Henry Gee, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth St Martins Press (2021) ISBN 9781250276650
- ↑ Nigel Nicholson, How Hardwired Is Human Behavior? (July–August 1998) Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/1998/07/how-hardwired-is-human-behavior
- ↑ Werner Heisenberg, The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory (2015 from original lectures in 1929) Martino ISBN 9781614278597
