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Comment by zero_iq | Hacker News Reader

It's simply named only for the analogy with the Copenhagen Interpretation -- everything is in a 'superposition' (all options possible) until a single 'observation' is made, which causes a reduction in the available possibilities, which propagates across the space/structure. That's as far as the analogy goes.

This sort of loose analogy is a perfectly reasonable way to name things IMHO.

I don't hear anyone complaining that bubble sort doesn't consider buoyancy and surface tension, or that the flood fill algorithm doesn't involve any actual fuid dynamics.

I have my own theory on why people like to complain about this particular analogy, but for the sake of not causing offence I will leave it there ;p

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I think people are saying that the algorithm isn't cool enough for its name.

Bubbles aren't cool, so bubble sort must be rightly chided. /s

Quantum physics? Now that's cool, regardless of how much one knows about it.

I don't think the reason gets much deeper than that, barring any disagreements that it is just plain misleading.

I guess you could argue to some degree that a name should be usefully informative to an outsider or newbie. But that doesn't really apply to things that have already established their cool factor, like 'deep learning', 'crypto', 'agile', 'serverless', etc..

I would object to the name on the basis of it influencing a misleading association. A person's brain will jump from one idea to the next based on familiar recall, and when people can't 'jump' to the correct association because their brain is filled with bad ideas that have nothing to do with the topic, then we all suffer for having to defend against it.

I’m complaining about it because when I first heard about it, I tried to look up information to understand the algorithm and.. it turns out that “wavefunction collapse” is not useful, at all, as search terms or a starting point to learn anything about this algorithm. The name is completely useless to understanding it or finding out any more about it.

You could say the same about bubble sort or whatever, sure, and a case might have been made about the name when it was first introduced, but now they’re established names where “bubble sort” are good search terms that will help you find lots of information about the algorithm, but “Wavefunction collapse” isn’t a widely used algorithm and the name has a lot of existing publications that are not related (because they’re to do with actual quantum physics, not this algorithm). Even searching “wavefunctoin collapse algorithm”, when I last did it, only found quantum physics result (that seems to have changed though, as I just did a google search and the entire first page is about this algorithm, but I see most of the results are quite recent: within the last few months)

>> but I see most of the results are quite recent: within the last few months

I think you've answered your own question. I don't know how long this has been around and I'm not sure how long people have been calling it this. Regardless of any of that, it is now getting a name and recognition under that name. The world changes, and you're seeing a little of that here.

On a related note, I wrote some code to take a piece of music and output guitar TAB. I'd print a number on every string where it was playable, and this left me to manually search for optimal fingerings (some notes have 5 or 6 options). Wave Function Collapse is exactly the type of thing I had been trying to devise to reduce the TAB to something easy to play. You could even change the constraints for different picking styles.

The original WFC github project was posted in 2016, so it took approx. 2 years before it became searchable. It’s fine now, but it was incredibly frustrating for me when I tried to look into it around January or February of this year.

The WFC algorithm itself is very interesting to me and now that I can find more information and code, I’m eagerly planning to play with t myself in the coming weeks. :)

We need to lower the noise floor or raise our attenuation level to valuable ideas, but yes this is a valid point. On a larger scale with population levels rising and our rate of dicovery/creation happening at idk... really fast, it behooves us crate diggers of good ideas is to step up our game. My only helpful suggestion to aid in this is read The War of Art[1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1...

I understand what you're saying but I'd like to push back a little. The loose analogy of superposition applies to a very large number of algorithms just as much as it applies to this one. You could likewise apply it to sorting - a "Wave Function Collapsing Sort" considers all elements of a set to be in superposition, then gradually "collapses" each index to the element which matches. It does this iteratively until it either sorts incorrectly and must start over, or until it produces the correct sort.

In other words, this isn't actually a superposition. You could definitely say there's entropy involved, but really this is replacing the word "uncertainty" with "superposition." If you do that, an extraordinary number of algorithms suddenly fit the template of wave function collapse. Basically anything that has a probability distribution and iterative reduction, because that's what this is (and not a wave function).

I'd also say that flood fill actually looks like a flood filling a room if you see a 2-dimensional visual of it pathfinding around obstacles. Personally I don't really care about how algorithms are named, but I think flood fill is a bad example because it actually looks like a flood filling a room.

> I have my own theory on why people like to complain about this particular analogy, but for the sake of not causing offence I will leave it there ;p

Why even mention it then? "I'm thinking something that might be offensive so I won't say anything"; sort of undoes the whole not saying anything bit, doesn't it?

> In other words, this isn't actually a superposition.

Obviously. That was my point: it is but a simple analogy. There are no actual bubbles in bubble sort, either.

As for my theory -- I suspect that whenever quantum physics is mentioned, a certain brigade of users like to take the opportunity to look smart by showing off their (in this case largely irrelevant) knowledge of quantum physics. (While simultaneously showing how they fail to grasp the concept of simple analogies, and so actually appearing the opposite. But then I'm zero_iq, so what do I know...!)

> until a single 'observation' is made, which causes a reduction in the available possibilities, which propagates across the space/structure

wavefunction collapse is a singular event not an iterative process, results are not equiprobable, alternative probabilities become 0, there is no undo/traceback etc etc. the analogy doesnt make sense, it's just a fancy name

To my knowledge, this depends on the interpretation. Some interpretations consider wave function collapse an actual physical process, some don't, so I don't believe it is possible to make an absolute statement such as yours. There is still some debate about whether or not the process occurs over finite time (at least there was 2-3 years ago -- perhaps things have moved on since then and I haven't caught up. If there have been new developments along these lines, I'd be interested to see it).

Regardless, it can be computed as a process, and this is where I believe the analogy in question arises. Is a perfect analogy? Of course not -- no analogies are. Bubble sort has no bubbles and involves no liquids or gravity, or buoyancy, etc. etc. the analogy still works despite that IMO.

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