On 2003-03-28T17:17:08-0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > With more interesting systems it can also be used as a spot to split > the execution stream and assign weights to the new streams, deferring > final evaluation of the results until you've enough information, or > have reached a stopping point and have to generate some random > numbers, to collapse the system to a final result. With even more interesting systems you can collapse the system to a *specified* final result. That is, you can make random choices at the beginning of your program, then require that its final output be a certain value. You can then ask what the initial random choices are likely to be to give rise to the final output that you specified. http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~avi/Research/ibal.html A special case of this technique is the algorithm TeX uses to break paragraphs into lines (where you specify that the final output look good). -- Edit this signature at http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/ken/sig http://protesttracks.ffem.org/
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