Terse Code

Terse Code | iabdb

According to this nature article additive solutions are preferred to subtractive solutions. This heuristic may encode a form of Chesterton’s fence, but it blinds people to finding solutions that are better by taking for granted what is. The article says people don’t dismiss the subtractive solutions, rather they never consider them in the first place. The idea behind terse code, may simply reverse this heuristic thus opening the mind to novel connections that would be hidden by a strictly additive approach. This might explain why constraints are so often a boon to creativity. They take the place of the mind’s general purpose heuristics in narrowing the search space, but leave open areas pertinent to the problem. So for example, trying to fit a piece of code into n chars, forces the user to rethink complicated methodologies and solve just the core problem. Other constraints that work similarly are constraints on performance, usually solutions that achieve 80% or more of the result can be achieved by simplifying the objective. Such bouts of creativity only come from constraining the resources that can be marshaled at a given task. A great example of this is the SVM technique used early to recognize hand written addresses by the US post office. The computing power and training sets available were a small fraction of what we have today. Neural networks are a counter example, they seem to work better as they get larger. Perhaps that explains our own bias, or we might discover that some constraint on the networks yields vast improvements, only time will tell. My sympathies lie with occam.

Terse Code

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