Beyond efficiency

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/be-201301131528.pdf
alt: https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/beyond-efficiency/

Esteem for efficiency should be tempered with respect for robustness.

...

To see how robustness and efficiency can trade off, consider sorting a list by comparing pairs of items... imagine sorting just 52 items, like a shuffled deck of cards... Each algorithm picks pairs of cards to compare, and passes them to a ‘card comparison component’ to determine their order.

Here’s the twist: Imagine that component is unreliable. Maybe malware corrupted it. Maybe sunspots cooked it. We don’t know why. For this demonstration, the card comparison component usually works fine, but on 10% of comparisons it gives a random answer.

Averaged over 1,000 shuffled decks, here are the errors made by each sorting algorithm:

Bubble sort’s inefficient repeated comparisons repair many faults, and its inefficient short moves minimize the damage of the rest.

...

It is time to study and manage incorrectness in the interest of robustness. We should not shun the trade-off, but rather, we should understand, engineer, and teach computation beyond correctness and efficiency only.

Robust-first computation now.

• David Ackley

via Lu Wilson (I haven't listened to the podcast, just got the link from the notes)