[Bradford] Monday’s meeting

[Robert Burrell Donkin]

On a more interesting Computer Science note, consider instead machine
encodable statue.

Tax statue (like many others) is currently rules-based. Humans are
great at rules based systems, but designing logics cabable of
efficiently processing rules based system under the Turin limit
(consistent and complete) is very challenging. Encoding computer
systems of this type is a hard problem (from a computer science
perspective). Large commercial houses are most often poorly equipped
to develop software that's hard in this way. Academia lacks numbers to
take on hard problems with volume So, it should come as no surprise
that there have been so many failures.

Considered from this perspective, the base problem lies with the way
the statue has been formulated.

Expressed as deterministic process algorithms coupled with rules-based
definitions, then the statue would be readily machine encodable,
perhaps using a domain-specific language with a grammar suitable for
code generation. Humans would still need to argue definitions but the
machine processing side would be readible portable.

All sounds very much do-able to me. At which point, I stopped thinking
about the technical problem...

If anyone cares enough to poke people at the cabinet office, I'm no
longer currently bound by an exclusivity clause so I'd be happy to
tell them how it could be implemented pro bono. Or at least, which
academics to ask about the details...

Robert

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 9:46 PM, John Robert Hudson
<j.r.hudson at virginmedia.com> wrote:
> Hi Mike
>
> Perhaps suggest they use the Open Build Service next time so that they can
> make it available in whatever format people need it :-)
>
> John
> --
> On Wednesday 11 Nov 2015 21:03:00 Mike Goodman wrote:
>> On 10/11/15 10:04, Robert Burrell Donkin wrote:
>> > On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 11:45 AM, Mike Goodman <mike.goodman at zen.co.uk>
> wrote:
>> >> Hi Folks,
>> >>
>> >> I've been tryin g to get HMRC's "Payroll Basic Tools" working on Arch.
>> >> It's
>> >> in a tarball which claims to be the Linux version and they reckon it
>> >> works
>> >> on Ubuntu.
>> >
>> > Still frustrates me that HMRC and most civil servants are clueless
>> > about licensing. Copyright protects source code in the same way as
>> > binaries.
>> >
>> > Just shipping the source under a suitable closed, viral license would
>> > allow people to compile on whatever *nix-ish platform they most
>> > favour...
>> >
>> > Robert
>>
>> Hi Robert,
>>
>> I totally agree. I rang them to see if they had any idea. They didn't
>> and admitted as much. Although it does seem they are aware of the
>> Cabinet Office promise that they must supply appropriate software and
>> the EU law which tells even the tories they can't hand everything IT to,
>> in this instance foreign, proprietary system licensors.
>>
>> I tried pointing out that they must release in a format to which all
>> have access. I got the impression they knew that but had no idea how to
>> implement it.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Mike
>>
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>