On 11.08.2013, at 19:45, David Barbour <dmbarbour_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah, 'indeterministic' has a specific meaning in computer science:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_in_concurrent_computation
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbounded_nondeterminism
I think that, given the considerable debate about these terms, one could say that simply the possibility of rewriting an algorithm on the fly would induce at least something what has been called "choice indeterminism", but probably more than that? One of the central axioms of unbounded nondeterminism is what is called fairness, i.e. a computation that may take any time of the world, but is guaranteed to arrive _eventually. Not a bad description for the computation that a live coder contributes to the process, after all...
>
> What you're describing, "not fixed to a specific set of functions", I'm not sure there is a single word for that. There are different flavors of "not fixed" (can we add functions? remove or disable functions? alter definitions of existing functions? rearrange/recompose functions or software components? tweak parameters?). Different words include 'extensible', 'editable', 'configurable'....
We don't have a word for "reading the program while it runs" - but that alone makes a difference!
Received on Sun Aug 11 2013 - 20:20:52 BST