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▲ i_am_a_peasant a day ago

Nah I don't disagree with you. Thing is even if you formally prove that for every input you produce a valid output. In safety certified software, there's the problem that if that input comes from a sensor, a sensor is an inherently probabilistic thing, and it may be that you will have false positives. The best you can do is build a safety case that even if you get false positives you end up in a safe state, but you can't guarantee that they won't ever increase operational costs.

▲bajard a day ago | parent | next [-]

I once had a sensor that rounded the data, so the output unwittingly fitted into a grid. The equations that had to be used on that data gave infinite results because the grid sometimes rounded slopes into vertical lines.

So I had to reconstruct a signal that fitted the data for the equations to work at all. But the reconstruction was no longer measured data. It was made up, and there was no single solution for fitting the data. That meant I could claim to "respect the data" while producing any result I wanted.

▲i_am_a_peasant a day ago | parent [-]

Reminds me of that von Neumann quote "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

▲aleph_minus_one a day ago | parent [-]

> "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

Indeed: here are two papers on this topic:

Jürgen Mayer; Khaled Khairy; Jonathon Howard. Drawing an elephant with four complex parameters. 2010. https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article-abstract/78/6/648/1042... Article without paywall : https://publications.mpi-cbg.de/Mayer_2010_4314.pdf

Dian Jin; Junze Yuan. Fitting an Elephant with Four non-Zero Parameters. 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07909v1

▲bajard a day ago | parent [-]

Given that information can be encoded in a string of digits of infinite length, there is no limit to how precisely the elephant can be drawn. Any image file is a string of bits, a single parameter.

▲SoftTalker 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In cases like that you also will generally have three (or some odd number) of sensors and require a majority of them to agree to determine what your input is. Still not guaranteed to be correct, but the odds are better.

▲i_am_a_peasant 8 hours ago | parent [-]

“3 B’s make a D” :D