[r-t] Extension

[Don Morrison]

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 1:13 AM, Robin Woolley <robin at robinw.org.uk> wrote:
> All the 1950's reports on Extension are at:
>
> http://www.methods.org.uk/archive/index.htm

Some bits from the introduction to the 1950 paper (addressing only
extension of even bell methods to higher, even stages) caught my
attention:

> There can be no “mass production” system for the extension of
> methods since there is no system of extension which can be rigidly
> applied to all methods. Actually, there are relatively few methods
> which will extend satisfactorily and most methods have their own
> particular problems.
...
> We believe that the objective in extension should be to produce a
> method acceptable to the practical ringer (not so much the
> mathematician) as the obvious extended form of the parent.

This sounds to my ears distinctly anti-algorithm.


-- 
Don Morrison <dfm at ringing.org>
"One of us recalls...being told by his computer center's programming
consultant that he had misused the random number generator: 'We
guarantee that each number is random individually, but we don't
guarantee that more than one of them is random.'"
      -- William H Press, et al., _Numerical Recipes in Fortran 77_