(side-)effects and ...

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of 05 Jul 2015 20:29:11 +0000, Stefan Ram writes:
>  But why do we not have a common and well-known term for
>  the counterpart, that something does not modify the state
>  of the world, but that the state of the world does 
>  influence the value (behaviour) of a call such as
>  »datetime.datetime.now().time()«?

... to continue from the earlier post, I had a phone call and wrapped
it up too soon ....

However, fuzzy logic is only one way to get such an effect.
You can get the same using Neural Nets and some sort of learning
algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network

Or you can try some sort of Genetic algorithm
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm

These ways to go after the same problem

And we have Python packages for this, too.

The thing is that these things, aside from being suitable for a
whole lot of problems where you really want the outside environment
to influence the result of your code, don't have a lot in
common.  So, among practicioners of these arts -- mostly found
designing AI and control systems -- there doesn't seem to be a
pressing need for a general term that includes any of these.

And, at least in the area of control systems, there is a real problem
with the testing of such things.  They have this unfortunate habit of
producing results that were undreamed of by their creators, which
is not what you want in the control system for your high-speed train --
or especially if you are the insurance underwriters for that same train.
So there is rather more effort spent on going the other way -- writing
code that does the job but which is less and less dependent on outside
factors than in finding ways to include more outside factors in the
code we already have.

Laura