[dns_snek]

And how exactly do you foresee probabilistic systems working out in real life? Nobody wants software that seldom does what they expect, and which tends to trend toward desirable behavior over time (where "desirable" behavior is determined by the sum of global feedback and revenue/profit of the company producing it).

Today you send some money to your spouse but it's received by another person with the same name. Tomorrow you order food but your order gets mixed up with someone else's.

Tough luck, the system is probabilistic and you can only hope that the evolutionary pressures influence the behavior to change in desirable ways. This fantasy is a delusion.

[AkshatM]

You're thinking of probabilistic systems at run time. People are talking about probabilistic systems at compile time.

Whatever gets generated, if it passes tests and is observably in compliance with the spec, is accepted and made permanent. It's the clay we're talking about Jackson Pollocking, not the sculpture.

[dns_snek]

I'm not, I'm thinking of poorly engineered systems that display buggy, unintended behaviors at runtime.

> observably in compliance with the spec

That's so easy to say and so incredibly hard to implement! Most unintended behaviors will never end up being prohibited/defined in the specification written by non-programmers.

The act of translating requirements from human language into well-defined semantics is what programming is.

[suddenlybananas]

Tests don't go over the space of all possible inputs and you have no idea how other inputs are generalized or interpolated.

[asdff]

I think you misunderstand. Once established a function found through random walk is no different than a function found in any other way. If it works it works, if it doesn't it doesn't.

[dns_snek]

I didn't misunderstand. I'm talking about all the exciting unintended behaviors you're adding and all the invariants that you're not preserving by arriving at solutions through randomness rather than careful design and engineering.

Yes a function will always do "the exact same thing" at runtime, but that "thing" isn't guaranteed to be free from race conditions and other types of bugs.