A ball bearing works because its components never fit perfectly. The engineer does not design precise parts: he programs acceptable deviations. Tolerance bounds do not limit error. They define the zone of functional existence.
DNA polymerase copies the genome with an error rate of 10⁻⁹ after proofreading. Without this residual imprecision, no variation, no evolution. The copying error is the engine of adaptation. Absolute fidelity would be the death of the system.
The object does not exist despite its defects. The defects are the condition of its functioning. Function arises from controlled imprecision, never from absolute conformity.
Doctrine
Tolerance is not the acceptance of error. It is the recognition of the object's vital space.
Vecteur ouvert
Machine learning algorithms halt their gradient descent before the global minimum, early stopping preserves generalization capacity by preventing the model from fitting the noise. At what threshold does optimization become destructive, and is that threshold calculable before the function has been destroyed?
