The Hard Problems

What is a “Hard Problem”? There are of course many opinions on this subject and just like the concept of Beauty, it’s always in the eye of the beholder.

The best known and promoted definition of a Hard Problem is most likely the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) definition, which the Agency has promoted as “DARPA Hard”. The problem with DARPA’s definition is that it omits the commercial aspects of Quantifiability and Economicality, DARPA operates within a different financial constraints from commercial businesses.

Hard Problem Definition
Hard Problem Definition

Spelling it out

In the modern world of jargon, ambiguity, acronyms and opacity, the High Skills Partners have adopted writing conventions, to counter ambiguity and enhance the clarity of the content. In short, we are strictly SIP (Spell It Out) in our writing.

With the English alphabet only having 17576 possible three-letter combinations, a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) will always be domain-specific and at the best, unclear.

A TLA is an encapsulation of ambiguity by its own, does it mean two, three, ten, twenty, two hundred, thousand or ten thousand letters?

Pop quiz, what does CNN stands for? Is it Cable Network News or is it Convoluted Neural Network or …

I guess that by now you get my point 😉