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A comment on The Hardest Program I've Ever Written (2015). Parent comment

Re:The Hardest Program I've Ever Written (2015) by bradleyjg on Monday August 21, 2017 @03:27PM (#15067053)
I doesn't look like that stopping time is user-defined, it's a compiled in constant.

Given that, I don't see any reason why the algorithm should be non-deterministic just because it gives up after a set number of iterations. As long every time it sees a given string it tries the possibilities in the same order, scores them the same way, and stops at the same place then it should be deterministic.

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Re:The Hardest Program I've Ever Written (2015) by pmoriarty on Monday August 21, 2017 @04:24PM (#15067539)
By "user-defined", I meant to refer to the user of the algorithm (AI or not), who is the developer.

You're right that if the algorithm described in the article will always get the same result given the same input it will be deterministic in a way that the kinds of AI methods I'm thinking of (the stochastic kind) will not. That sort of non-determinism will be a problem if you expect your code to be formatted the same way every time it goes through the formatter.

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