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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
by 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 agoI'm thinking of energy in the physics sense.
- catnaroek 10y agoOh, 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 agoEnergy 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.