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Re:Five Kinds of Nondeterminism by saltlyfe on Friday February 21, 2025 @07:00AM (#43126549)
Your first example is not non-deterministic, it's probabilistic. Drawing a sample from a truly random distribution doesn't make the program non-deterministic.

Non-determinism comes from transitions which have no known distribution and might cause your program to take alternate execution paths without any predefined rule. That's clearly not true in your example.

Re:Five Kinds of Nondeterminism by tpoacher on Friday February 21, 2025 @08:35AM (#43127229)
I think you're splitting hairs here. Not sure what definition or context of determinism you are using, but in most scientific fields not only is probability the de-facto example of non-determinism, but in fact the words are often used interchangeably.

By definition, if your outcome is a random draw from a probability distribution (known or unknown), you cannot guarantee the outcome in a deterministic manner; you can only guarantee that in the limit, a large number of random draws will follow that distribution (known or unknown). But that's not what one would typically call determinism.

Re:Five Kinds of Nondeterminism by saltlyfe on Friday February 21, 2025 @11:35PM (#43136146)
In formal methods, a subfield of computer science, we'd typically use the definition of non-determinism that is widely used within our own field. For example, see: https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/632/what-is-the...
Re:Five Kinds of Nondeterminism by tpoacher on Monday February 24, 2025 @06:09AM (#43158191)
I don't think that link contracts anything. It just says that probability is a subset of ND but not vice versa. Which is true. But this is not the same as saying probability is not ND. Maybe I'm missing something...