Comment by pfdietz
5 hours ago
Well, yes. But the point is that random sampling lets you do it without thinking. Even better, it can sample over multiple spaces at the same time, and over spaces we haven't even yet formalized. "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." (Whitehead)
An example is something like "pairwise testing" of arguments to a function. Just randomly generating values will hit all possible pairs of values to arguments, again with a logarithmic penalty.
The point is that you can exhaustively explore the space without logarithmic overhead. There's no benefits to doing it with random sampling and it doesn't even save thought.
I already explained what the benefit is. What is it with this focus on offloading work from computers to people? Let people do things more easily without thinking, even if it burns more increasingly cheap cycles.
You haven't explained what the benefit is. There aren't "spaces we haven't formalized" because of the pigeonhole principle. There are M bits. You can generate every one of those 2^M values with any max cycle permutation.
What work is being offloaded from computers to people? It's exactly the same thing with more determinism and no logarithmic overhead.
2 replies →