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bagnalla commented on Infinite Procedurally Generated Djent Music youtube.com/watch?v=PbbDy... · Posted by u/bagnalla
"it's a collection of hand-crafted algorithms. No machine learning is involved."
I think it is an exciting time for functional programming and formal methods: they seem to have found something of a home in the recent cryptocurrency boom, where people are recognizing that high-assurance really matters lest you lose millions of dollars.
Why people don't seem to worry as much about self-driving cars boggles the mind. One hopes the loss of human life would be as concerning as the loss of money. I think the issue is partly technological. As Leroy says, formal methods for certifying machine learning-produced models are pretty undeveloped whereas cryptocurrency protocols are 'traditional', 'algorithmic' programs and so more amenable to analysis with existing verification tools. I also think it is partly cultural in that machine learning practitioners seem often to be less aware of formal methods and the possibility of verifying software.
Verification of machine learning models, especially w.r.t. robustness to so-called "adversarial examples" [1], is a major research topic at the moment. There are certainly people worrying about it in the machine learning community, but it appears to be a very difficult problem.
The issues can probably be fixed by writing a bit of a better compiler, HolyC2 maybe?
I've thought about using this Lisp interpreter to bootstrap a compiler for a new language, probably targeting HolyC. If someone were to write some decent lexer/parser generator tools in HolyC it would go a long way in making something like that possible.
I'd love to see HolyC ported to Linux. The language seems like a pleasure to use with some interesting features.
HolyC is great -- default arguments and built-in exception handling are big pluses over C. There are a few shortcomings, though, such as the lack of short-circuiting logical operators and some unfortunate behavior related to variable declarations within nested scopes (just avoid doing that IMO).