It’s amazing how much understanding I can fake in fields I know absolutely nothing about.
Conversation
😂
It's not entirely faking it since general control theory is just nonlinear stochastic ODE theory applied to engineering, so if you know basic grad level math, your intuitions will be roughly right
1
2
To your larger point re: expressivity of logics, control theory can be viewed as a "hack" where we work with rare islands of tractability where probabilistic systems behave as simply as first-order predicate logic systems despite not being generally reduiable to them
1
3
In general, I think the correct logic for control theory is second order... modal logic in possible worlds. Control theory rarely works with that explicitly (I did, briefly) but implicitly, that's the assumed world
1
(Although my master’s thesis was on the use of a modal logic of time in robot planning, so maybe I would have :)
1
heh my postdoc was also robot planning and also used modal logic along with temporal interval calculus (Allen) representations. It's the obvious tool to apply when you run into certain problems. But I only got as far as "you can represent things this way"
1
Whoa, I had not thought about Allen’s thing in >30 years and had completely forgotten its existence until you mentioned it!
I had no idea you did modal logic. What a weird coincidence! Mine proved a model-theoretic completeness result for one:
1
1
:)
2
1
May explain why we share similar skepticisms of rationalists... did you ever read the paper "Prolegomena for any future qualitative physics" by Sacks and Doyle? It caused a major flame war that resembles the rationalist/critics arguments. I may have mentioned it.
heh so you know the storm that followed... there were several rounds of debate and calling bullshit and counter-bullshit, but I think sacks and doyle were basically right. What the QP people thought they could do automatically was bullshit
1
2
Show replies

