Hopefully Pedant ends up pretty much being a continuation and completion of Squiggle, that’s the dream anyway. Basically Squiggle plus more abstraction features, and more development time poured into it.
When do you think a tool that combines the strengths of Squiggle and Guesstimate will become available? Given where you are at now, what do you think would be the fastest way to integrate the dimensional analysis capabilities of Pedant with the probabilistic modelling capabilities of Squiggle? How long would it take?
Thanks for checking out this post! This is an old one, and I’m no longer as interested in dimensional checking in models. However, I may come back to this project because I have a feeling it could be used to optimize Squiggle code as well as offer dimensional checking.
What do you mean by “Combines the strengths of”? To me, Squiggle is the successor of Guesstimate, and the strengths of Squiggle + the strengths of Guesstimate = the strengths of Squiggle? What features are you looking for?
When I started this project, Squiggle was not in a state where Pedant code could be translated into Squiggle. This is no longer the case, so if there was sufficient interest, I could finish my project to get Pedant to compile to Squiggle for execution. This would likely take a week of work or so.
However, as much as I love this project, I don’t want to do that until I’ve exhausted any easier option of doing the research I want to do + worked out the theory required to create optimizations. There’s a possibility that this need will arise once I try to run more Value of Perfect Partial Information analysis for my GiveWell work which is quite slow in Squiggle, or possibly if I could work with the much larger models funders run.
I made a typo. I meant to ask you about integrating the type-checking functionality of Pedant with the probabilistic modeling functionality of Squiggle. I think a version of Squiggle where each value has units that are propagated through the calculations would be very useful. This would allow the user to see whether the final result has the right units.
This sadly, will likely never happen, or at least not for a few years. This was never within Squiggle’s scope. Squiggle currently has much more critical issues before adding such a feature!
Could you give a quick clarification on the difference between Pedant and Squiggle?
Hopefully Pedant ends up pretty much being a continuation and completion of Squiggle, that’s the dream anyway. Basically Squiggle plus more abstraction features, and more development time poured into it.
When do you think a tool that combines the strengths of Squiggle and Guesstimate will become available? Given where you are at now, what do you think would be the fastest way to integrate the dimensional analysis capabilities of Pedant with the probabilistic modelling capabilities of Squiggle? How long would it take?
Thanks for checking out this post! This is an old one, and I’m no longer as interested in dimensional checking in models. However, I may come back to this project because I have a feeling it could be used to optimize Squiggle code as well as offer dimensional checking.
What do you mean by “Combines the strengths of”? To me, Squiggle is the successor of Guesstimate, and the strengths of Squiggle + the strengths of Guesstimate = the strengths of Squiggle? What features are you looking for?
When I started this project, Squiggle was not in a state where Pedant code could be translated into Squiggle. This is no longer the case, so if there was sufficient interest, I could finish my project to get Pedant to compile to Squiggle for execution. This would likely take a week of work or so.
However, as much as I love this project, I don’t want to do that until I’ve exhausted any easier option of doing the research I want to do + worked out the theory required to create optimizations. There’s a possibility that this need will arise once I try to run more Value of Perfect Partial Information analysis for my GiveWell work which is quite slow in Squiggle, or possibly if I could work with the much larger models funders run.
I made a typo. I meant to ask you about integrating the type-checking functionality of Pedant with the probabilistic modeling functionality of Squiggle. I think a version of Squiggle where each value has units that are propagated through the calculations would be very useful. This would allow the user to see whether the final result has the right units.
This sadly, will likely never happen, or at least not for a few years. This was never within Squiggle’s scope. Squiggle currently has much more critical issues before adding such a feature!