It seems possible that one could invent a measure of “control power”
I think the likelihood of this comment being helpful is small, but I know of two sort-of-adjacent efforts. Both of which took place under the auspices of DARPA’s META Program, a program for improving systems engineering.
The first is a complexity metric, which they define as unexpected behavior of any kind and attempt to quantify in terms of information entropy. The part about the development of the metric begins on page 4.
The second is an adaptability metric. This one is considerably fussier; they eventually had to produce several metrics because of tradeoffs, and then tried to produce a valuation method so you could compare the metrics properly. It relies on several specific techniques which I have no knowledge of, and is much more heavily anchored in current real applications, but the crux of the effort seems to align with the “choices don’t change later choices” section above.
This post feels to me like the same type of conversation that would have been helpful in the work of these two papers, so I mention them on the off-chance the relationship works both ways.
I think the likelihood of this comment being helpful is small, but I know of two sort-of-adjacent efforts. Both of which took place under the auspices of DARPA’s META Program, a program for improving systems engineering.
The first is a complexity metric, which they define as unexpected behavior of any kind and attempt to quantify in terms of information entropy. The part about the development of the metric begins on page 4.
The second is an adaptability metric. This one is considerably fussier; they eventually had to produce several metrics because of tradeoffs, and then tried to produce a valuation method so you could compare the metrics properly. It relies on several specific techniques which I have no knowledge of, and is much more heavily anchored in current real applications, but the crux of the effort seems to align with the “choices don’t change later choices” section above.
This post feels to me like the same type of conversation that would have been helpful in the work of these two papers, so I mention them on the off-chance the relationship works both ways.