https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic
Researchers use the term stochastic systems to describe the physical systems in which the values of parameters, measurements, expected input, and disturbances are uncertain
Would we expect different designers to create different designs? Does the same designer ever design competing solutions? Why is that? What factors inform a design decision and outcome?
Outside of hard determinism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_determinism) isn’t everything a stohastic process?
Gah. Wish one could edit posts. Now the typos jump out.
Researchers use the term stochastic systems to describe the physical systems in which the values of parameters, measurements, expected input, and disturbances are uncertain
Please show how that relates to design. And why doesn’t your reference support your claim?
1) Generally, stochastic (pronounced stow-KAS-tik, from the Greek stochastikos, or “skilled at aiming,” since stochos is a target) describes an approach to anything that is based on probability.
from stochastic
Artificer and artifact are both physical.
Please answer the questions:
“Would we expect different designers to create different designs? Does the same designer ever design competing solutions? Why is that? What factors inform a design decision and outcome?”
Or don’t if you have no domain knowledge of design.
So what? That doesn’t mean design by an intelligent agency is stochastic. And your questions don’t help
For completeness:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stochastic
“Definition of stochastic
1
random; specifically : involving a random variable
2
involving chance or probability : probabilistic ”
And how does design meet that definition? Is design based on chance and probabilities? No, design is based on knowledge
I think mental processes like design are predictable but not algorithmic
and
uncertain but not random.
There is a sweet spot there that we humans are hardwired to recognize when we see it.
If it weren’t for that innate ability we would unable to distinguish between those things with minds and those with out.
peace
Please note frankie is avoiding the questions.
Clearly that’s not the sole determinant, but is knowledge stochastic? Let’s take a trivial example, vocabulary.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15773700
Yes.
Richardthughes,
So if you design a computer video game can you attribute that design to a stochastic process?
I think this discussion can easily go sideways unless a precise description of stochastic process is agreed upon.
Evolution has been described in the text books as blind and unguided. The blind watchmaker is a trial and error process. Are these what you consider stochastic? Are you trying to broaden the meaning of stochastic?
paywalled: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12848217
“Scientific creativity as constrained stochastic behavior: the integration of product, person, and process perspectives.”
Single cause attribution is unsophisticated. But there are certainly stochastic components.
Why don’t you tell me what you understand “Stochastic” to mean.
Would we expect different designers to create different designs?
Yes.
Does the same designer ever design competing solutions?
Yes.
Why is that?
Varied reasons. One might be to test for efficiency. Another might be to present to the customer different options to see which one they prefer.
What factors inform a design decision and outcome?
That would be a long list.
Outside of hard determinism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_determinism) isn’t everything a stochastic process?
Hmm… My initial intuition is no.
Absolutely! So Nineteenth Century! 🙂
Unless it’s natural selection.
Richardthughes,
I agree with you that design could have stochastic components. Real design understands conceptually the end game. If I am designing a video game and the characters, how they move on the screen must be understood and planned before code is initiated.
In the continuum between stochastic and deterministic this is much closer to deterministic.
The probability is very close to zero that if I randomly touch my keyboard that I will even create one video character so that I can select him to be part of a video game I am designing.
If I want to move this probability above zero I need to create a flow chart and then know a computer language in order to translate this logic chain to computer commands.
We only know of one way to do this and that requires a human with above average intelligence.
Please note that Richie cannot tell us the relevance of his OP questions.
Would we expect different designers to create different designs?
Yes and that doesn’t mean design is stochastic
Does the same designer ever design competing solutions?
It is possible and that doesn’t mean that design is stochastic
Why is that?
Because different solutions could exist and tat doesn’t mean that design is stochastic
What factors inform a design decision and outcome?
Knowledge, cost and resources. And that doesn’t mean that design is stochastic
This should help:
introduction to stochastic processes
Bwahahahah. meltdown: ACTIVATE! https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:intelligentreasoning.blogspot.com+tat
That’s a subset, and they are stochastic – they themselves are not fixed nor deterministic but exist in an continuum of outcomes. So we have a process where the inputs and agents involved have stochastic attributes. This makes the process stochastic. Test – are the outputs (designs) variable? Yes. Stochastic inputs and outputs.
how do you think this helps you? Have you read it? Can you understand it? What’s your favourite method of dealing with covariance in markov chains?
Richie you say-so is meaningless. The link supports me as it shows stochastic processes depend on probability distributions. Design does not..
The only way Richie can make his point is to find someone who is an authority that agrees with him and can demonstrate he is correct.
Short of that stochastic processes will always be those processes absent of intention and not determined
Frankie,
The agents and environments of design clearly have attributes that are stochastic: Resources and capabilities.
Wrong, but as you ask:
Go ahead, why not?
Rich:
I miss ‘obvioulsy’, the earlier Joeism:
Link, link
I think Frankie finally figured out what the red squiggly line means. Unfortunately, ‘tat’ doesn’t get flagged.
1.
stochastic process – a statistical process involving a number of random variables depending on a variable parameter (which is usually time)
framework, model, theoretical account – a hypothetical description of a complex entity or process; “the computer program was based on a model of the circulatory and respiratory systems”
Markoff process, Markov process – a simple stochastic process in which the distribution of future states depends only on the present state and not on how it arrived in the present state
random walk – a stochastic process consisting of a sequence of changes each of whose characteristics (as magnitude or direction) is determined by chance
stationary stochastic process – a stochastic process in which the distribution of the random variables is the same for any value of the variable parameter
Design is not a statistical process
Genetic Stochastic Design Algorithms?
Why? Show me a design process that does
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/StochasticProcess.html
Doob (1996) defines a stochastic process as a family of random variables from some probability space into a state space . Here, is the index set of the process.
Papoulis (1984, p. 312) describes a stochastic process as a family of functions.
I wonder if the design process matters. I read that the way the computer program that defeated the world Go champion was designed, was in two phases. The first was to provide a fixed set of rules (the rules of the game) and simple tactics, and the second was to add code that permitted the program to learn. The initial program was fairly easy for an expert to defeat. But after the program played against itself a few bazillion times, nobody could beat it any longer.
Unlike simpler games like checkers, Go does not reward simply building up an enormous library of situations associated with optimal moves. There are simply too many situations. Even if a suitably large library could be constructed, the lookup time would make the game unplayable in real time.
The game designers simply do not (and can not) know exactly what (or how) their program learned from playing against itself. So was that a stochastic process? Deep Blue used somewhat similar techniques for chess.
all of them.
Do all designs have the same resources appropriated to them, yes or no?
In Google Scholar, I get about a million hits for “stochastic process,” and about half-a-million hits for “random process.” The two terms have the same meaning.
The generalization of a process is a field. But I get 336 thousand hits for “random field,” and only 9 thousand hits for “stochastic field.”
Tom, I hold your opinion in high regard. Do you think Design (the broader enterprise, not a specific instance) has stochastic components?
People who have never designed anything in their lives might have the naive view that design has no random/uncertain/stochastic elements to it. If a person thinks design means taking their perfect existing knowledge, documenting their intentions, then building something that works the first time, that is a naive view.
To understand the whole process, one must include all the trial-and-error that led to the acquisition of the knowledge in the first place.
Such as buildings. Do architects design them from scratch? Hardly. Our ancestors likely started with lean-to’s and animal hides tied to poles. Then poles lashed to other poles. Stone and iron tools allowed cutting of larger lumber for log homes. Discovery of cement allowed for foundations and baked clay for bricks. How did they learn? By putting stuff up and having it fall on their heads! It kept falling on their heads until someone figure how to make it stay up. Principles of leverage, stress/strain, tensile strength, cross-bracing, and arches had to be discovered along the way. Buildings, were not designed – they evolved.
The stochastic nature is present in discovering everything that DID NOT work, and human culture retained the things that DID work.
Flint,
I disagree with what you’re saying about Go. Here is the Nature article on AlphaGo:
“Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search.”
Note immediately “tree search.” There is also a stage of supervised learning that exploits a large repository of moves made by expert Go players.
Stochastic processes are collections of interdependent random variables. https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/754/
Design processes are not collections of random variables.
Frankie,
And Joe is reduced to cherry picking very specific definitions from math classes. Precious.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stochastic
“1
random; specifically : involving a random variable
2
involving chance or probability : probabilistic ”
involving chance or probability.
Richie the cupcake is reduced to redefining terms to suit his needs. Not one reference supports your claim, Richie. Why is that? Not one paper on the subject lists intentional design as a stochastic process? Why is that?
Intentional design is the antithesis of random, which in context means without a plan.
And Richie, it doesn’t matter if you cherry-pick. You will never find a definition of stochastic process that includes intentional design.
LOL. Now we have new Joe go-to phrase “intentional design”!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design
“Design is the creation of a plan or convention for the construction of an object, system or measurable human interaction (as in architectural blueprints, engineering drawings, business processes, circuit diagrams, and sewing patterns).[1] Design has different connotations in different fields (see design disciplines below). In some cases, the direct construction of an object (as in pottery, engineering, management, coding, and graphic design) is also considered to be design.
Designing often necessitates considering the aesthetic, functional, economic, and sociopolitical dimensions of both the design object and design process. It may involve considerable research, thought, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design. Meanwhile, diverse kinds of objects may be designed, including clothing, graphical user interfaces, skyscrapers, corporate identities, business processes, and even methods of designing.[2]
Thus “design” may be a substantive referring to a categorical abstraction of a created thing or things (the design of something), or a verb for the process of creation, as is made clear by grammatical context.”
Joe has also created the new field of “unintentional planning”. What a genius! Meanwhile, look at all of those stochastic inputs: ” considering the aesthetic, functional, economic, and sociopolitical dimensions of both the design object and design process.”
Yes, intentional design so that you don’t get confused with apparent design or optimal design.
No.
Mung,
Thanks, and obviously true. So some of the inputs to the design process are indeed variable?
So if I am developing some software, I need to understand all the trial and error that went into the design of the programming language that I am using, and all the trial and error that went into the design of the computing platform it will run on, etc., etc.?
No wonder no one understands the design process!
I see Richie is unaware that natural selection, a stochastic process, is supposed to account for the appearance of design in biology.
is variable the same thing as stochastic?