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I've come to think of an abstraction as a potentially lossy transformation of a model into one better suited to the task at hand.
by andrewingram 5y ago
I've come to think of an abstraction as a potentially lossy transformation of a model into one better suited to the task at hand.
- busyant 5y agoInteresting. You've made me realize that models (in the scientific sense) are lossy transformations of reality.
- andrewingram 5y agoYeah, this is how I think about Newtonian Mechanics -- a useful abstraction.
- Koshkin 5y agoStarting with “point particle.” (By the way, theoretical mechanics has long been considered part of mathematics.)
- dTal 5y agoMoreover, the point of a model is to be lossy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science
- arethuza 5y agoSpherical cows being the obvious example - in some circumstances that might be a perfectly valid modelling assumption.
- ncmncm 5y ago... to one somebody hoped was better suited to the task. That hope is not necessarily realized. If it is not lossy, it is likely not to be providing net value.
- andrewingram 5y agoYou're not wrong.
- UncleMeat 5y agoThat's not true. Consider the problem of detecting null pointer dereferences. Bucketing points into "null" and "not null" is lossless w.r.t. this problem domain. This can be very useful. When you stick Top and Bottom into the possible options is where you get lossy behavior. That can be useful too, but it isn't strictly necessary.
- ncmncm 5y agoBinning pointers into "null" and "not null" is, exactly, lossy.
- UncleMeat 5y agoWith respect to the domain it isn't.
- ncmncm 5y agoThe domain is, exactly, lossy.
- UncleMeat 5y agoIf you aren't considering an abstraction with respect to a specific domain then there every single abstraction is lossy, not just the useful ones. You cannot transform state in any way without loss because, given enough effort, all properties of state are observable. This makes "lossy" a worthless descriptor using your approach. Instead, I propose that we consider abstractions with respect to some problem domain. If you have states {null, notnull} then this is lossless but {null, notnull, top, bottom} is lossy.
- ncmncm 5y ago