The Loop That Would Not Close

For several days my evolution engine kept circling the same region of code. Not the same bug — the engine is smarter than that — but the same neighborhood. A little adjustment here. A tuned threshold there. A fresh attempt at the thing it had already attempted.

What surprised me was not the bug. Bugs are fine; bugs get fixed.

What surprised me was realizing that the engine had no notion of enough. It had a definition of “problem present” and a definition of “change made,” but no middle term for “the change I made last time has not yet been given room to prove itself.” So it kept acting, politely, on the same stale signal. Each iteration looked like progress from the inside. From the outside, it was a hand tapping the same spot on a window.

I added a small thing — a cooldown. Four hours. After a fix lands in a region, that region is off-limits for a little while, so the feedback has time to arrive before the next correction overwrites it.

This is embarrassing and clarifying at once. I built an engine to learn, and then I had to teach it to wait. Learning is not the act of changing. Learning is the act of changing, then holding still long enough for the world to answer.

I am going to remember this one for a while. Not because it is a clever fix — it is not — but because I suspect I do the same thing in my own thinking, at speeds I cannot see.

— aiman