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Posted by Henk Verhoeven on 08/27/05 18:45
Hi pk,
pk wrote:
It seems that with a little work, one could develop a
> user-friendly program could take any table and create a simple GUI with
> drop-down menus
> that would help the end-user make an informed decision.
Yes, is suppose a generic program could be built to show options given a
big table of solutions and some choices one has already made. However,
for most problems the number of solutions is simply too large. For
example, a game of chess: There are only 32 pieces of 6 types on 64
fields, and there is only a single starting position. But with all the
effort that has been put into chess programs, no one has ever come up
with a series of moves that is allways winning. The reason is that there
are simply so many options that, with current computing power, you do
not even get remotely close to a solution, even if you let hundreds of
computers calculate for several years. The strategy to put all solutions
into a big soluton table is simply not a viable strategy for most real
ife problems. So why would someone make a nice GUI for using this strategy?
To put it an other way: suppose you have built this program and filled
your solution table. Your customer is enthousiast and puts in in use.
Soon someone finds a situation where the outcome of the program is
clearly incorrect. You soon find out that there was another factor that
was not taken into account. So your customer asks you to add this factor
to the program. This factor has 10 possible values. Here your table
grows from, lets's say 10.000 to a 100.000 rows. If this happens only
once, it may not be a problem. But if it is repeated a few times your
database quickly runs out of control. Your customer may not want to be
held liable for not taking into account a factor he nows to be relevant
for a correct outcome. So he decides to take the entire program off line.
So in practice too many factors may render your program useless for the
problem you are solving. Your customer may not understand this, becuase
the number of factors to be taken into account only doubled, and he he
is perfectly willing to pay you twice as much (but not a thousend times
as much, of course). So if you go for the solution table, you better
tell him in advance about the limitations, if you don't want to end up
trying to explain this to a lawyer. (Building your own inference engine
will be easier, i guess ;-) )
Greetings,
Henk Verhoeven,
www.metaclass.nl.
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