Finally Fifth? Searching for answers in an uncertain world.

Anthony Di Franco will talk to us about the system he's been working on for computing in the face of uncertainty. Anthony's ideas are wide-ranging and provocative -- you won't want to miss this one!:

Most of us are probably familiar with the trajectory software projects take: quick early progress with few people working on them, which transitions, as the scope grows, continuously but sharply to a regime where large numbers of people and large amounts of effort, at the scale of some of the largest corporations in history, are insufficient even to keep up with already known problems. Typically, motivated by the prevailing formal logic background in programming language theory, people turn to software methodologies with stronger a priori guarantees to mitigate this problem, such as functional programming with types, but I will propose a different, though not mutually exclusive, approach, drawing on a control theory and systems theory background. Motivated by Robert Kowalski's perspective developed in his "Algorithm = Logic + Control" (1979) I claim that the real problem is the combinatorial explosion in the number of algorithms required to enforce a desired set of relationships as that set of relationships grows in size. The solution is to finally come to grips with nondeterminism, and the solution to that, in turn, is to use approximate search techniques that can take advantage of uncertain information, information feedback, and compression of the search space. This motivates the design of the "Fifth" software system I'm currently working on. We'll conclude with a description of work in progress on the Fifth system.

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