

Norvig on Adaptive Software - yters
http://www.norvig.com/adapaper-pcai.html

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palish
Agent Technology, Decision Theory, Reinforcement Learning, Probabilistic
Networks? I say these will overcomplicate your software and likely have
scaling problems. Avoid over-engineering. It is not necessary for a product to
be "adaptive". I wouldn't want my refrigerator to adapt into a washing
machine.

It seems like there are a lot of software engineers that try to achieve the
absolute perfect design, just like there are many who don't try at all. As
with anything in life, extremes are rarely optimal.

It is advantageous for your source code to be succinct and rewritable, but not
for it to adapt its own resource usage patterns. The adaptations could cause
cascading performance problems. Just do the simplest design that gets the job
done, profile, then use the feedback to optimize your algorithms. Such is
software.

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larryfreeman
I think that the main point is not what you should use today but the direction
that software as a trend is going in the long term. That, in my view, is why
the article is so well worth reading.

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larryfreeman
Awesome post. I've been thinking a lot about these ideas and its nice to see
it presented so clearly and concisely.

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fauigerzigerk
Interesting. I wish there was a date on it though.

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beau
[http://web.archive.org/web/19980206223552/http://www.norvig....](http://web.archive.org/web/19980206223552/http://www.norvig.com/adapaper-
pcai.html)

