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tavavex • yesterday at 7:35 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

No matter what your opinion on determinism is, the point I made that what OP is doing is very unlike a predictable and deterministic factory game still stands.

But beside that, I don't think that LLM non-determinism is really the same thing as what you see in engineering. Engineering has things like tolerances and redundancy, and while they accommodate random events, they're known, estimated and expected. They also deal with external factors, not the potential of shoddy engineering in the same system they're working on. The best way I can compare it is building a bridge that can withstand twice the normal expected full load and with enough structural redundancy to not collapse even after a prolonged lack of maintenance. These things account for many types of natural degradation and edge cases that are expected. And then there's building a bridge that you know will collapse in the next 10 years at a completely random moment, and instead of engineering a more robust solution, tacking on more gadgets to make the collapse less bad - automatic gates that close the entrances to the bridge, lake drainage system that will suck out the debris, a drone system that drops a brand new randomized bridge on the same spot, and so on. It doesn't feel very much like engineering.

If that doesn't sound convincing to you, consider one other thing. If you gave an engineer a non-deterministic solution and a deterministic solution to the exact same problem, which do you think they would prefer? Would they willingly remove determinism from a system? Maybe it's not the chaos of the real world that scares software developers so much - lots of them have to work on systems that directly interact with the real world. What if it's the fact that there is now a fight to take away their nice, understandable, satisfying deterministic solutions and inject probabilistic chaos into things that never had to have it in the first place - into absolutely everything?


Replies

clivedup • today at 12:56 AM

> No matter what your opinion on determinism is, the point I made that what OP is doing is very unlike a predictable and deterministic factory game still stands.

I didn't mention determinism or predictability.

I said "It feels like playing factorio: whatever is manual needs to be automated away.".

I'm sure you can find many differences between Factorio and what I'm doing.

> If you gave an engineer a non-deterministic solution and a deterministic solution to the exact same problem, which do you think they would prefer? Would they willingly remove determinism from a system?

We choose non-determinism in our systems a lot, because we get better outcomes in other aspects.

* Non-deterministic network latency: Packet switching rather than circuit switching.

* Multi-tasking operating contending for the same resources.

* Multi process programs whose interleaving/execution is non-deterministic.

* Profile guided optimisation, depends on the profile.

* The entire field of randomised algorithms.

I prefer deterministic processes, but if the benefits of non-deterministic processes are significant enough, I pick non-deterministic.