Quote:
Originally Posted by Starson17
Second approach - still book based:
When asking to see the first set of matching books, why not show me the set (1, 2, 3)? Yes, 2 and 3 are not dupes, but I'm not sure if that's useful when showing the books that match book 1. I still need to see if 1 matches 2 and 3. Is it better to do it in two stages or in one?
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Doesn't that mean that you must spend brain cycles deciding again that 2 and 3 are not dupes? I can see why you might want that, but then one must work through rather carefully the notion of 'false positive'.
Regarding transitivity, consider the following. Assume:
- a test that matches if two books contain one title word in common and 1 author in common.
- a book 'Ectoplasm' by Joe Blogs (book 1)
- a book 'Auras' by Patricia Posts (book 2)
- A book 'Ectoplasm and Auras' by Joe Blogs and Patricia Posts (book 3). This is an omnibus edition.
The test will identify books (1,3) and (2,3) as potential dupes. Transitivity would give us (1,2,3), which is clearly wrong, as 1 and 2 are definitely not dupes of each other. I am ignoring further levels transitivity, which would expand the set even more.
The question then becomes which is better, showing all three which might help identifying the omnibus but requiring some thought to ignore the (1,2) pair, or showing (1,3) (2,3) which shows the information the test actually found (and avoids the transitive closure problem). I don't have an answer. My guess is that this will come to personal preference. Joy to the GUI man.
