RE: Determinism is hard & not the only thing on our plate...
In general, the problem of providing form-invariant enclosure is NP-hard, see our paper
http://www.cs.utep.edu/vladik/2011/tr11-35.pdf
that we submitted recently to Reliable Computing
________________________________________
From: stds-1788@xxxxxxxx [stds-1788@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of N.M. Maclaren [nmm1@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2011 6:07 AM
To: Dan Zuras Intervals
Cc: stds-1788@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Determinism is hard & not the only thing on our plate...
On Aug 4 2011, Dan Zuras Intervals wrote:
>
> Nick, I don't want to go tit for tat with you in an open
> forum in the hope that one of us will change our mind.
> That does nobody any good & pisses off our readers.
>
> Determinism is hard. You have to pay a price for it.
> Things can be done to mediate the problem of parallelism
> but it is true that performance is part of the cost.
>
> This does not mean we should not offer our users the means
> to compute deterministically. We should. We should also
> offer them other things.
It is clear that we are still not communicating. I am asserting not
just that it is hard and conflicts with performance, but that it is
actually infeasible. Some of the infeasibilities that I am claiming
are mathematical or are statements about what language standards say,
and therefore subject to proof or disproof. In those cases, there
are two possibilities:
I am wrong, and therefore my statements can be disproved. In this
case, I should be corrected, and then I should just shut up.
I am right, and therefore you are proposing an infeasible project.
In this case, following the path you propose will lead to 1788 failing,
whether or not it is completed.
Regards,
Nick Maclaren.