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> Constraints provide freedom. For a great video on this, see Runar Bjarnason's talk "Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain" (https://www.youtube.com/watch

• Retra 10y ago
  I've been slowly working on writing something up on this subject that shows how the constraint "energy must be conserved" allows us the freedom to solve a large number of problems just by describing them in terms of energy. Hopefully to tease out a more clarity on how we can transform abstract symmetries into practical solutions to real problems.
  • catnaroek 10y ago
    > "energy must be conserved" I like this analogy! Are you thinking of “energy” as some measurement of the amount of freedom a specification gives implementors to make their own design decisions? (Possibly modulo some set of changes deemed “trivial”, like renaming identifiers, reordering independent statements, etc.)
    • Retra 10y ago
      I'm thinking of energy in the physics sense.
      • catnaroek 10y ago
        Oh, my bad. I'm certainly aware of the usefulness of the conservation of energy when you need to relate the initial and final states of a physical system solely under the action of conservative forces. But I thought you were talking about using the conservation of energy as an analogy for a strategy for tackling programming problems.
        • Retra 10y ago
          Energy is a linguistic construct for solving problems in abstract models of reality. That's not too different from how programming works, it's just a different set of models. Thus energy is just a special case of a more general problem solving technique which can be employed in other domains.