writing specs is hard. For instance the easiest way to comply with "player should never reach the flag" is to disable movement completely, so then you have to specify "player should never reach the flag while still being allowed to move" and so on (liveness). It's not practical for most programs
Yeah, in small examples it's pretty neat: Define a "sorted" property, write a law that checks that the list is sorted and contains the same elements and someone else implements the sort and together with a proof for correctness. However larger software systems have an exponentially larger surface for reasonable and unreasonable edge cases. When I hit ctrl+s in my editor I expect that my cursor does not change colour, that the window does not minimize, that the program does not crash if there is no disk space left and so on. I don't see how this does not devolve into "negative space programming" where the user would have to anticipate and constrain every possible unwanted behavior of his software.
>> When I hit ctrl+s in my editor I expect that my cursor does not change colour, that the window does not minimize, that the program does not crash if there is no disk space left and so on.
Seems to be rather sturdy in my experience. Would we even be able to read an electronic record after 100 or 200 years of storage? Old piece of paper is quite accessible.
And you need to know how to read to read paper copies. Same thing, essentially. Anyone speaking hieroglyphics fluently? Point is, if you take care of your archive and make sure it remains accessible, it doesn't really matter whether it's digital or analog.
Not at all the same thing - what equipment do you need to read hieroglyphs on top of understanding the language (which goes for digital, too)? If you have the paper and understand the language, that's it. We already can see that accessing old digital data isn't necessarily easy if it wasn't always kept on/converted to current media and formats (will we keep that up for millenia)?
And both storage can be broken, needing reconstruction.
If I were to give you a 70y old book in English vs some 70y tape with data on - which one is easier to read?
For the third time: IF you take care of the data, it’s fine in both cases. If you neglect your beloved book for 70 years and store it under a bridge, it’s going to be completely useless as well. The key part is the taking care of your medium.
The taking care of the book for 70y does not involve recreating the book over and over again to keep it readable or keeping a reading machine in working condition (or be able to recreate it). It's an entirely different level of care.
If the medium isn't destroyed, it is directly readable if it's a book, but not necessarily so in digital because hardware and software is needed - just taking care of the original medium isn't enough in digital over centuries.
Documents getting lost/misplaced/stolen/destroyed is common in some places (owing to corruption or what). "Local in scope" but rampant. Digitization has been a panacea as there is more control over the records, but now more prone to hacking.
There have been plenty of instances of paper-based land registries being wiped out. It's just usually a very local problem because paper lends itself more to decentralized storage
Yes, so quite limited in scope. We have no experience with storing and keeping accessible electronic records for hundreds of years, though, but we know already that accessing old storage media and formats isn't necessarily easy.
So far accessing old storage media from 50+ years ago hasn't really been a problem. Reading old tapes and punch cards/tapes or even early hard drives is something that a single motivated hobbyist can achieve in a few weeks or months with a microcontroller and patience.
But it's more difficult to imagine that 1000 years from now someone will be able to read from a PCI-E NVME drive if the specs get lost along the way (ignoring for a moment that flash storage most likely won't retain data that long).
I would not call needing weeks or months not a problem (assuming you also get the potentially proprietary software to understand the data recovered). Also, early hard drives weigh 100s of kilograms, so just physically handling them is difficult.
the problems are general and abstract, domain specific knowledge and memorization don't help. Figuring out the rules, the goal, the controls, and how to solve in a reasonable budget all indicate some level of general ability.
So basically they're well suited for like, an octopus or a crow?
I was thinking about those species earlier in the context of, what does intelligence mean outside of language.
The benchmark appears to be testing the same thing. Although I don't know how much transfer there would be between this data set and the kind of situations a crow or an octopus would encounter.
Edit: Huh, it's just a Game boy game? I just did a couple of the tasks. It looks like C64 era game to me. Navigating levels. A lot of overlap with animal intelligence then.
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