Well, yes. But the point is that random sampling lets you do it without thinking. Even better, it can sample over multiple spaces at the same time, and over spaces we haven't even yet formalized. "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." (Whitehead)

An example is something like "pairwise testing" of arguments to a function. Just randomly generating values will hit all possible pairs of values to arguments, again with a logarithmic penalty.

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AlotOfReading an hour ago | parent [-]

The point is that you can exhaustively explore the space without logarithmic overhead. There's no benefits to doing it with random sampling and it doesn't even save thought.

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24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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pfdietz an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I already explained what the benefit is. What is it with this focus on offloading work from computers to people? Let people do things more easily without thinking, even if it burns more increasingly cheap cycles.

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AlotOfReading 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

You haven't explained what the benefit is. There aren't "spaces we haven't formalized" because of the pigeonhole principle. There are M bits. You can generate every one of those 2^M values with any max cycle permutation.

What work is being offloaded from computers to people? It's exactly the same thing with more determinism and no logarithmic overhead.

	▲	pfdietz 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> There aren't any "spaces we haven't formalized" Suppose that space of N points is partitioned into M relevant subsets, for now we assume of the same size. Then random sampling hits each of those subsets in O(M log M) time, even if we don't know what they are. This sort of partitioning is long talked about in the testing literature, with the idea you should do it manually. > what work is being offloaded The need to write that program for explicitly enumerating the space.