Goal Seeking Software
In this design, the user specifies an acceptable outcome. The computer program has a set of operations it can combine. Crucially, the software must be able to try out different combinations of the operations without causing harm. When it finds a sequence that produces the acceptable result, the program is done.
Goal seeking is fine when the computer can identify every possible undesired result, but this is rarely possible. People are far more skilled at recognizing undesirable outcomes than software is.
Also, producing software to identify every possible bad solution is at least as complex as simply finding a solution. See the article on the frame problem for more on this.
Read more about this topic: Software Brittleness Problem
Famous quotes containing the words goal and/or seeking:
“Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework—an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self- sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.”
—Betty Friedan (b. 1921)
“There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)