Trade-off - Trade-offs in Specific Fields

Trade-offs in Specific Fields

Trade-offs are important in engineering. For example, in electrical engineering, negative feedback is used in amplifiers to trade gain for other desirable properties, such as improved bandwidth, stability of the gain and/or bias point, noise immunity, and reduction of nonlinear distortion. The Golden Gate Bridge is a prime rare example where few engineering and aesthetic trade-offs had to be made.

In demography, trade-off examples may include maturity, fecundity, parental care, parity, senescence, and mate choice. For example, the higher the fecundity (# of offspring), the lower the parental care. Parental care as a function of fecundity would show a negative sloped linear graph.

In computer science, trade-offs are viewed as a tool of the trade. A program can often run faster if it uses more memory (a space-time tradeoff). Consider the following examples:

• By compressing an image, you can reduce transmission time/costs at the expense of CPU time to perform the compression and decompression.
• By using a lookup table, you may be able to reduce CPU time at the expense of space to hold the table, e.g. to determine the parity of a byte you can either look at each bit individually (using shifts and masks), or use a 256-entry table giving the parity for each possible bit-pattern, or combine the upper and lower nibbles and use a 16-entry table.
• For some situations (e.g. string manipulation), a compiler may be able to use inline code for greater speed, or call run-time routines for reduced memory; the user of the compiler should be able to indicate whether speed or space is more important.

The Software Engineering Institute have a specific method for analysing tradeoffs, called the Architectural Tradeoff Analysis Method or ATAM.

Strategy board games almost always involve trade-offs. In chess do you trade a bishop for position? In Go, do you trade thickness for influence, and just when does the middle game begin?

The study of ethics can be viewed as a system of competing interests that must be traded off against each other. (Is it ethical to use Nazi science to prevent disease today?)

In medicine, patients and physicians are often faced with difficult decisions involving trade-off. One example is localized prostate cancer where patients need to weigh the possibility of a prolonged life expectancy against possible stressful treatment side-effects (patient trade-off).

Governmental trade-offs are among the most controversial political and social difficulties of any time. All of politics can be viewed as a series of trade-offs based upon which core values are most core to the most people or politicians.

In music, the term "trade-off" can also refer to solo instruments that swap solo duties, such as musical groups with two lead guitarists, who both share guitar solos. The term is used frequently in heavy metal, where bands often feature "twin guitars", such as Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Megadeth, and Slayer, all of which feature lead guitar song sections often involving 4 or more "trade-off" solos. A more limited number of bands, such as Dream Theater, also implement the trade-off with keyboards and lead guitar.