MIT News: New mathematical framework formalizes oddball programming techniques
From the post:
Two years ago, Martin Rinard’s group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory proposed a surprisingly simple way to make some computer procedures more efficient: Just skip a bunch of steps. Although the researchers demonstrated several practical applications of the technique, dubbed loop perforation, they realized it would be a hard sell. “The main impediment to adoption of this technique,” Imperial College London’s Cristian Cadar commented at the time, “is that developers are reluctant to adopt a technique where they don’t exactly understand what it does to the program.”
I like that for making topic maps scale, “…skip a bunch of steps….”
Topic maps, the semantic web and similar semantic ventures are erring on the side of accuracy.
We are often mistaken about facts, faces, identifications in semantic terminology.
Why think we can build programs or machines that can do better?
Let’s stop rolling the identification stone up the hill.
Ask “how accurate does the identification/merging need to be?”
The answer for aiming a missile is probably different than sorting emails in a discovery process.
If you believe in hyperlinks:
Proving Acceptability Properties of Relaxed Nondeterministic Approximate Programs Michael Carbin, Deokhwan Kim, Sasa Misailovic, and Martin Rinard, Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2012) Beijing, China June 2012
From Martin Rinard’s publication page.
Has other interesting reading.