Warrigal comments on What are your rules of thumb? - Less Wrong

19 Post author: DataPacRat 15 February 2013 03:59PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (75)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 February 2013 03:38:31AM 2 points [-]

What's the difference between a boundary case and an extreme case?

Comment author: Alexei 17 February 2013 10:00:16PM 2 points [-]

Example: testing a multiplayer game. Boundary cases: a game running with no players / max players. Extreme case: game running with a lot of lag and interference.

Generalizing this to: boundary cases lie on some kind of natural boundary. Extreme cases are for things that don't have boundaries (e.g. you can always have more lag).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 February 2013 08:58:48AM 4 points [-]

Also boundary cases aren't necessarily extreme, e.g., if you have some kind of optimizing buffer that kicks in when there are at least 10 players, 9 player and 10 players (and going from 9 to 10 and conversely) are boundary cases but not extreme cases.

Comment author: iDante 16 February 2013 05:51:38AM 0 points [-]

I don't think there is one. At least not mathematically, which is where I do all these checks anyway. Solving PDEs ho!