This concept of “optimisation power” was previously mentioned here. To recap on some of the objections raised at that time:
Optimisation power suggests something useful—but the proposed metric contains no reference to the number of trials, the number of trials in series on the critical path—or most of the other common ways of measuring the worth of optimisation processes. It seems to be more a function of the size of the problem space than anything else—in which case, why “power” and not, say “factor”.
Before christening the notion, there are some basic questions: Is the proposed metric any use? What is the point of it?
Yes! I actually reread this post today, and realized I was kinda thinking sloppily about power vs effort for years.
Power is what you observe when you live in a society of minds, the minds effect the world somehow but you don’t care about the implementation of any mind’s underlying search process.
Effort (which we sometimes call pressure, as in “applying optimization pressure”) is closer to a asymptotic analysis / computational complexity framing, where the particular choice of searcher is extremely relevant. (something like number of epochs times cost of each epoch, but more generally)
This concept of “optimisation power” was previously mentioned here. To recap on some of the objections raised at that time:
Optimisation power suggests something useful—but the proposed metric contains no reference to the number of trials, the number of trials in series on the critical path—or most of the other common ways of measuring the worth of optimisation processes. It seems to be more a function of the size of the problem space than anything else—in which case, why “power” and not, say “factor”.
Before christening the notion, there are some basic questions: Is the proposed metric any use? What is the point of it?
Yes! I actually reread this post today, and realized I was kinda thinking sloppily about power vs effort for years.
Power is what you observe when you live in a society of minds, the minds effect the world somehow but you don’t care about the implementation of any mind’s underlying search process.
Effort (which we sometimes call pressure, as in “applying optimization pressure”) is closer to a asymptotic analysis / computational complexity framing, where the particular choice of searcher is extremely relevant. (something like number of epochs times cost of each epoch, but more generally)