4 ms·

Actually, there are only finite ways to fail. It just happens to be a large number. Thinking of interactions of the world as propagations of signals and conside

Actually, there are only finite ways to fail. It just happens to be a large number. Thinking of interactions of the world as propagations of signals and considering Kolmogorov-style descriptions of entropy would lead one to this conclusion of finiteness. See: "Kolmogorov complexity" Further, there are a finite number of patterns of failure, which is of course less than the number of absolute ways things could fail. The biggest detriment is not that things can fail, but that people get overwhelmed by believing that such things are infinite in scale.

MathematicalArt 6y ago
As an example, there are only 16 categorical manifestations of software exceptions based on the following categories: - Synchronicity, Scope, Origin For Synchronicity we have: - Synchronicity - Asynchronicity For Scope we have: - Process-specific - Cross-process For Origin we have: - Data origin - Temporal origin - External origin - Process origin Then you combine them such as "Synchronous-CrossProcess-Temporal Origin." The total is 16 ways. Even if something were somehow to be missing from this categorization scheme, it would only add a finite amount of possibilities to the permutations. Yet this taxonomy seems quite complete as is. See: “Error Handling in Process Support Systems” by Casati & Cugola.
eeegnu 6y ago
If the context isn't a formal proof, you can safely substitute infinite with 'might as well be infinite' most of the time to get the intended meaning.