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?
Are those stochastic inputs? I would say they were variable but definitely not stochastic. Am I missing something?
peace
I’ll let others answer that, but the very nature of “variable” shows it can vary. The values they can vary between and the probability density of those values are not clearly defined, but may be amenable to modeling.
Mung,
Why do you choose one language over another? What caused that?
You don’t need to understand the whole process to program something, to understand the whole process of programming is a different matter
I’d agree.
It seems like “may be amenable to modeling” clause would rule out stochastic processes. At least that would be my understanding.
In fact the area between not clearly defined and random is where I would say that design lives
peace
I’ll play devil’s advocate here. The theist, oops, I mean IDist, might argue that this is a false dichotomy, and any undeterministic choice made by the designer is due to her free will
Absolutely. But I don’t know that makes them a random variable. 🙂
Well, one language may be more or less geared to a particular sort of problem. For example, the R language is popular for statistics.
https://www.r-project.org/about.html
check it out
http://frame-poythress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ChancePoythress.pdf
I just finished this one it’s quite good and also free.
Poythress is a Harvard and Cal Tec trained mathematician and one of my favorites.
peace
dazz,
I guess so. We’ve had a few free will threads here. I think its known I’m a hard determinist. But as the bigger system is unknown to me, I still feel like I’m making choices (that I was always going to make) ;P
fifthmonarchyman,
There’s absolutely no way I’m wasting a minute of my life reading something called “A GOD-CENTERED APPROACH TO PROBABILITY AND RANDOM EVENTS”
Thanks anyway
Your loss.
If you wanted to understand what smart folks on the other side thought it would be worth your while.
peace
but.. but … diagrams!
Yes you know how us ignorant stupid fundies need pictures. 😉
What do you expect from such a uneducated rube.
I mean it’s only Harvard after all
peace
LMFAO
I don’t doubt there are smart folks on the other side, it’s just that at this point, I think it’s a pretty safe bet anything you recommend is not going to come from any of them
Everything that happens in the real world has stochastic components.
Sure, mathematics doesn’t (not counting probability theory). But that’s because mathematics is abstract, not real. Or, to say it differently, mathematics is idealization.
Newton’s laws are not stochastic, because they too are idealizations. An engineer, designing a rocket to the moon, has to take the random component into consideration — else he will miss the target. Reality is stochastic. Our intellectual accounts are often idealizations which miss that stochastic aspect.
confirmation bias anyone 😉
Just goes to show the benefits of living in an intellectual bubble.
Phd from Harvard, Who cares must be stupid if FMM likes him, ;-).
Certainly would not want to waste a minute finding out
I think our patron saint Cromwell is weeping
peace
That stupid guy with the book calls the “random” aspect an opportunity for creativity. It’s where all the action is.
peace
So optimal design can’t be intentional? Nor apparent? Interesting! Making shit up must be fun.
Let’s see if our eagle-eyed readers can spot the cherry-picked definition:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stochastic
or
https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/754/
Use the Explanatory Filter!
And understanding the whole process is important to avoid drawing bad conclusions, like “design is not a stochastic process”.
So you are saying that the environment in which it was developed shaped the end result? Funny how that works.
And still no references that say design is a stochastic process. Gee, I wonder why that is?
How is that a bad conclusion seeing that there isn’t any support for saying design is a stochastic process?
Until you show some sort of reasoning behind the claim there is nothing to disprove, but I do have an example.
Designs are planned, random is the antithesis of planned and stochastic processes are not planned.
The difficulty here is that I have far too much to say about the matter. In software engineering, it is usually quite a problem even to produce clear-cut requirements to be satisfied in design of the system. The process of requirements specification turns up questions that people had not realized needed answering. People are unsure of how to answer the questions — when you don’t yet have a system, it is difficult to say what it is that you want the system to do — but generate answers because they otherwise will not obtain a system. And when they do have a system, their experience with it usually leads them to want a system that works differently. What they want depends on what they already have — which is to some degree arbitrary. And what modifications they will get depends on the decisions made by designers of the original system. Changes that seem small to users are sometimes impossible to make without major (very expensive) changes to the system. Rather arbitrary decisions made in requirements specification and initial design place strong constraints on what the system will ever evolve to be. (Yes, I know what word I just used.)
I’m more comfortable saying that there is huge contingency in human design of complex systems than that there is huge stochasticity. (There are some scientists, e.g., Joe Thornton, who say that evolution is contingent.) However, checking the spelling of stochasticity in Wiktionary, I found this definition:
As for adaptive (learning) systems, there is inescapable uncertainty as to whether the future will be like the past. We have no logical justification for many decisions that we are forced to make.
Interesting post, Rich. I could get sucked into spending days on it. I’d love to talk, for instance, about the noisy connection weights of the 20 thousand neural nets that I used to forecast annual sunspots counts (with considerably greater accuracy than had previously been achieved). Making the weights noisy essentially limits their precision, and counters overfitting of the data with excessively many parameters in the model. Just for fun, I’ll mention that I learned from Jorma Rissanen’s Stochastic Complexity in Statistical Inquiry that it is not just the number of parameters, but also the precision of the parameters, that matters in modeling.
OMG yes! I LOVE pictures! More Kittens!
I deal with that by eating ice cream and pretending I didn’t see it..
YouTube.
Lecture 18
Not sure what the point of the OP is, but harking all the way back to the days of the explanatory filter, the first way to eliminate design is if the process is deterministic.
So if we define stochastic as the antithesis of deterministic, then clearly design is stochastic.
The first tap of the explanatory filter is regularity, as I recall.
Do you understand that active information is maximal for deterministic processes?
I do not, nor do I understand the relevance. But I hope you’ll get to it in your latest series. Or at the least I’ll look forward to seeing what the EvoInfo book has to say about active information. 🙂
Yes- regularity, law, necessity- I would think determinism fits those.
It shouldn’t be but if you have something to suggest otherwise present it so we can take a look.
The idea of probability as a measure of uncertainty about unknown but deterministic quantities is an old one.
Peter D. Hoff
I don’t recall any mention of deterministic processes in the technical papers of Marks, Dembski, and Ewert. I do recall some places in which they should have mentioned deterministic processes, but did not. Dembski had some things to say about determinism in Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information, but I don’t recall any comment about the active information of deterministic processes.
A deterministic process either hits or does not hit the prespecified target. That is, the probability that a deterministic process hits the target is either $q=1$ or $q=0$. The active information of the process is $$I_{+} = \log_2 \frac{q}{p}~\text{bits},$$ where $p$ is the probability that a baseline “undesigned” process hits the target. The denominator $p$ is fixed, and the numerator $q$ is either the greatest possible for any process, or the least possible for any process. That is, the active information of a deterministic process that hits the target is $$\log_2 \frac{1}{p} = -\log_2 p,$$ and the active information of a deterministic process that does not hit the target is $$\log_2 \frac{0}{p} = -\infty.$$
Not to be dismissive, but… Of course. Few scientists are saying with their probabilistic models that stuff just happens by chance (i.e., that unpredictability is due to quantum indeterminacy). Only in the last 15 years or so has it become clear that some mutations are the consequence of quantum-scale phenomena. Some mutations are caused by macroscopic processes (explained well, at least in principle, by classical physics).
You can plan to incorporate the enventual unplanned occurrence into your design, flexibility . There are lots of ways to create. The Grand Canyon is designed . If like ID someone designed whatever somehow sometime, that ability would be very useful for the non omniscient designers.
So if I planned to do cannonball in a pool then did it, is the shape of the splash a design?
It is still part of the PLAN. And who designed the grand canyon? It doesn’t look designed to me
No, plans are designed.
Designs are planned or does Richie think they happen by accident?
design:
a : to conceive and plan out in the mind
Whoopsie, cupcake…
Does it spell out “created by newton”? If so, I would say yes, designed.
My Holy Book says that the waters of the pool were without form until Newton took the plunge. Newton in-formed the waters of the deep end.
lol
http://bfy.tw/9A3K
Richardthughes,
I click.
I see: “design is a stochastic process which eventually leads to a deterministic plan.”
I recall: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
The author presumably means that design is sensibly modeled as a stochastic process. That is is not the metaphysical is.
Tom English,
There’s potentially a metadesign, a design of the design. I don’t want to get too regressy (not a word) but at some point a collection of resources is brought to bear on a problem. These resources are likely constrained in some way, (time, budget, expertise, materials, methods) and so the inputs of the process are fluid. If we were to look at enough designs, we would see a distribution of inputs. These we could model either parametrically or nonparametrically if they were cardinal numbers, and future designs would have inputs drawn from those distributions.
Edit to add: Categorical inputs could also be modelled as distributions.
Modesty would prevent that
Correct, to plan to incorporate the unplanned. What designed the Grand Canyon. That’s ok.
LoL! Richie quote mine strikes again! I bet you stayed up all night looking for that. Too bad that stochastic processes are unplanned whereas design processes are planned. That will never change.