Post #2437631
2026-04-27 15:31 UTC
@mxp@mastodon.acm.org @tomstoneham@dair-community.social actually, I think I have now understood the source of (my!) error - the “chain” consists of strung together immediate forward/backward steps not concatenation of steps and their undoing?
so linear transformations would be fine as one is only ever doing and undoing one operation at a time?
that would still leave the original problem of potential ambiguity in the instructions (add/remove Rembrandt lighting?)
(though non-commutativity across individual operations would still play an indirect role as it would amplify the emergence of differences, ie it makes it the case that errors interact?)
Replies (1)
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@mxp@mastodon.acm.org 2026-04-27 16:54
@UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org @tomstoneham@dair-community.social Yes, the idea is much simpler, and the data formats they use are also limiting the complexity. So, it’s treated as a problem akin to, say, file conversion: Markdown → DOCX → LaTeX → troff → Markdown should ideally result in the original document. I totally agree, this analogy is limited; but as a first approach it’s a clever approach to operationalizing the problem.