But you should be clear about just what it is you’re studying
The post discusses the thingness of things. Seven, for example, seems like a thing—an entity, an object. I naturally mentally relate to seven in many of the same ways that I naturally mentally relate to a table. So the question is, what if anything is in common between how we relate to each of those entities that seem like things?
Half-Ass is a reasonable example of a somewhat non-thing, according to the hypothesis in the post. It refers one fairly strongly to “half” and to “ass” “insertion sort”, but “insertion sort” barely refers one to Half-Ass, and likewise “half”.
Hmmm… perhaps the concept you’re going for is “a thing that my brain thinks is worth remembering (and/or categorizing, naming, or otherwise having a handle for)”? Which, of course, would be highly subjective and context-specific.
Suppose you were teaching CS students, and it was for some reason very common for your students to make that specific error of replacing “i < length(A)” with “i < length(A)/2″, because … maybe you’re working with a high-level language, but you’re implementing this part in assembly for speed, and the language runtime actually represents the integer N as 2*N because of pointer tagging and it’s common for students to forget that part; or maybe this is a compiler bug, triggered in rare but known circumstances (e.g. when the compiler decides to put the length into a certain register which is treated specially). Then you find it useful to know how Half-Ass behaves, so you can better test and diagnose your students’ programs, or create a test case to detect systems with the buggy version of that compiler (perhaps for white-hat or black-hat security purposes).
In those scenarios, does Half-Ass seem like more of a “thing”? And if those scenarios were real, but also there were plenty of “civilian” programmers who’d never used that language or that buggy compiler and probably never will, would it be valid for those programmers to say “No, I don’t think that qualifies as a thing”?
It [Half-Ass] refers one fairly strongly to “half” and to “ass” “insertion sort”, but “insertion sort” barely refers one to Half-Ass, and likewise “half”.
Hmm, you seem to be attaching significance to the words I used in the name. I would have thought that “whether something qualifies as a thing” was mostly independent of whatever words people had come up with when trying to name it. (The most descriptive name would be “insertion half-sort”, incidentally.)
In those scenarios, does Half-Ass seem like more of a “thing”?
IDK, but I like the question.
I’d say that what does seem like a thing is [insertion f-sort] where the fraction f is a parameter. Then [insertion 1/2-sort] is like [this particular instance of me picking up my water bottle and taking a drink], and [insertion f-sort] is like [me picking up my water bottle and taking a drink, in general].
Unless there’s something interesting about [insertion 1/2-sort] in particular, like for example if there’s some phase transition at 1⁄2 or something. Then I’d expect that it’s more of a thing (for example, that there’d be further interesting special properties of [insertion 1/2-sort] that we haven’t discovered yet, or that there’d be analogies to other phase transitions).
In the compiler example, the compiler representing N as 2N is more of a thing.
[insertion 1/2-sort] is then a somewhat meaningless coincidence of other meaningful things. You have your symptomatic cluster of phenomena: the CS student complains that a check fails, but when they print out the list, it seems sorted (though only the first part of the list actually printed, before the summarizing ellipsis....), the algorithm is clean and obviously right, etc. There’s some thingness I guess, in that there’s an insight to be had. But it’s a cavern which, when entered, turns out to be pretty clearly two other caverns connected by a tunnel. (I admit that the dynamical story here is unrefined, and I’d be interested in a better picture.)
The post discusses the thingness of things. Seven, for example, seems like a thing—an entity, an object. I naturally mentally relate to seven in many of the same ways that I naturally mentally relate to a table. So the question is, what if anything is in common between how we relate to each of those entities that seem like things?
Half-Ass is a reasonable example of a somewhat non-thing, according to the hypothesis in the post. It refers one fairly strongly to “half” and to
“ass”“insertion sort”, but “insertion sort” barely refers one to Half-Ass, and likewise “half”.Hmmm… perhaps the concept you’re going for is “a thing that my brain thinks is worth remembering (and/or categorizing, naming, or otherwise having a handle for)”? Which, of course, would be highly subjective and context-specific.
Suppose you were teaching CS students, and it was for some reason very common for your students to make that specific error of replacing “i < length(A)” with “i < length(A)/2″, because … maybe you’re working with a high-level language, but you’re implementing this part in assembly for speed, and the language runtime actually represents the integer N as 2*N because of pointer tagging and it’s common for students to forget that part; or maybe this is a compiler bug, triggered in rare but known circumstances (e.g. when the compiler decides to put the length into a certain register which is treated specially). Then you find it useful to know how Half-Ass behaves, so you can better test and diagnose your students’ programs, or create a test case to detect systems with the buggy version of that compiler (perhaps for white-hat or black-hat security purposes).
In those scenarios, does Half-Ass seem like more of a “thing”? And if those scenarios were real, but also there were plenty of “civilian” programmers who’d never used that language or that buggy compiler and probably never will, would it be valid for those programmers to say “No, I don’t think that qualifies as a thing”?
Hmm, you seem to be attaching significance to the words I used in the name. I would have thought that “whether something qualifies as a thing” was mostly independent of whatever words people had come up with when trying to name it. (The most descriptive name would be “insertion half-sort”, incidentally.)
IDK, but I like the question.
I’d say that what does seem like a thing is [insertion f-sort] where the fraction f is a parameter. Then [insertion 1/2-sort] is like [this particular instance of me picking up my water bottle and taking a drink], and [insertion f-sort] is like [me picking up my water bottle and taking a drink, in general].
Unless there’s something interesting about [insertion 1/2-sort] in particular, like for example if there’s some phase transition at 1⁄2 or something. Then I’d expect that it’s more of a thing (for example, that there’d be further interesting special properties of [insertion 1/2-sort] that we haven’t discovered yet, or that there’d be analogies to other phase transitions).
In the compiler example, the compiler representing N as 2N is more of a thing.
[insertion 1/2-sort] is then a somewhat meaningless coincidence of other meaningful things. You have your symptomatic cluster of phenomena: the CS student complains that a check fails, but when they print out the list, it seems sorted (though only the first part of the list actually printed, before the summarizing ellipsis....), the algorithm is clean and obviously right, etc. There’s some thingness I guess, in that there’s an insight to be had. But it’s a cavern which, when entered, turns out to be pretty clearly two other caverns connected by a tunnel. (I admit that the dynamical story here is unrefined, and I’d be interested in a better picture.)