Outside the philosophical and scientific uses of the word, ‘parsimony’ is defined as the quality of being reluctant to spend resources.Įxamples of parsimony A visual example of parsimonyĬonsider the following diagram, which contains three graphs, all of which share the same original data (the grey points), but each of contains a different model (the blue line), which is used to explain that data: Note: the use of parsimony in this manner is sometimes referred to as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony. This demonstrates the preference for a clean, generalizable explanation or solution, as opposed to one that needs to be specially tailored to the situation at hand. “The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.” ![]() For example, when speaking of code, Doug McIlroy and Jon Bentley are reported to have said that: This has led people to view parsimonious explanations and solutions as being not only preferable, but also more “elegant”. This means that a parsimonious explanation will generally be better able to explain a wider range of phenomena than a less parsimonious one, since a parsimonious explanation doesn’t rely on as many assumptions that are specific to the situation at hand. In addition, since parsimonious explanations are simpler, they tend to generalize better across a wide range of situations. the most parsimonious one) being the one that requires the fewest assumptions. In general, however, complexity is based on the number of assumptions that are required for a given explanation to make sense, with the simplest explanation (i.e. The complexity of a given explanation or solution can be defined in many ways, based on the context and on the factors involved. Specifically, according to the principle of parsimony, when looking for the best explanation or solution, you should select the simplest one, as long as no other criterion can be used in order to choose between the available options. The concept of parsimony is used to help people identify the most reasonable explanation for a phenomenon or the best solution to a problem, based on the complexity of the available options. This quote was identified by scholar James Franklin in his 2001 book ‘ The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal‘. ![]() ![]() - From ‘Almagest’ by astronomer Ptolemy (circa 150 CE). “In general, we consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypotheses possible, in so far as there is nothing in the observations to provide a significant objection to such a procedure.” Parsimony doesn’t guarantee a correct solution.
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