Why Interaction Is More Powerful Than Algorithms

Abstract

alancing operation is not uniquely determined by the operation alone, since it depends on changes of state by deposit and withdraw operations that cannot be predicted or controlled. An object's operations return results that depend on changes of state controlled by unpredictable external actions. The growing pains of software technology are due to the fact that programming in the large is inherently interactive and cannot be expressed by or reduced to programming in the small. The behavior of airline reservation systems and other embedded systems cannot be expressed by algorithms. Fred Brooks's persuasive argument [1] that there is no silver bullet for specifying complex systems is a consequence of the irreducibility of interactive systems to algorithms. If silver bullets are interpreted as formal (or algorithmic) system specifications, the nonexistence of silver bullets can actually be proved. Artificial intelligence has undergone a paradigm shift from logic-based to interactiv