Bring Me a Letter

This is an exercise about feedback – it's loosely inspired by Johanna Rothman's Bring me a Rock.

The machine will want something. You can give it an example, from your limited collection. It will tell you whether your example satisfies its need – and how your example compares with what it wants. It takes a moment to get feedback on the comparison, and it takes a little longer before it will accept another example.

There's no guarantee that the request can be satisfied by what you've currently got. You can make a new collection of examples, and you're likely to need several new collections. You can make a new collection immediately.

You'll need to come up with a strategy to reliably arrive at an acceptable example. That probably means you'll need to try a few approaches. We'll work on part I first, to develop that strategy. In part I, you always get honest feedback.

Then we'll see how your strategy works when the feedback has specific problems in part II, 1-3. And you can see whether you can detect the problems with the feedback in part III.

For Workroom PlayTime, we'll spend 10 minutes to get to our strategies. Then we'll share, and either talk about how we got there, or try our strategy against a pathology.

• Build a strategy by playing with Bring me a Letter part I
• See how it works when there are problems with feedback: Bring me a Letter part II - 1, part II - 2, part II - 3
• Can you detect the problem with the feedback? Bring me a Letter part III

A key role of testing is to provide feedback on the system that is available to test. There's more on feedback elsewhere... I've written that feedback needs to be swift, relevant and true. I'll add links... later.