From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Apr 03 2002 - 12:48:31 MST
Those of you who've read GISAI will be familiar with the idea of
"qualitative", "quantitative", and "structural" variables:
A qualitative variable has referents selected
from a bounded set which is computationally small
- for example, a set of twenty possible actions,
or a set of twenty-six possible lowercase
letters.
A quantitative variable is selected from the set of
real numbers, or from a computationally large set
which approximates a smoothly varying scalar
quantity (the set of floating-point numbers, the
set of signed 64-bit integers).
A structural variable is composed of a finite number
of quantitative or qualitative elements.
Examples: A finite string of lowercase letters,
e.g. "mkrznye". A real point in 3D space (three
quantitative elements). A 2D black-and-white
image (set of binary pixels).
I want to get rid of the confusing similarity between "quantitative" and
"qualitative". "Quantitative" fits well, so ideally I'd like to get rid of
"qualitative" and replace it with something that more effectively conveys
the image of a selection from a bounded set or binary set. Any suggestions?
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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