non-deterministic

Can anyone explain (better with an example in plain English) what a list monad can do to model non-deterministic calculations? Namely what the problem is and what solution a list monad can offer. Here's an example based on coin tossing. The problem is as follows: You have two coins, labeled Biased and Fair . The Biased coin has two heads, and the Fair coin has one head and one tail. Pick one of these coins at random, toss it and observe the result. If the result is a head, what is the probability that you picked the Biased coin? We can model this in Haskell as follows. First, you need the

After a bit of searching and reading the documentation, it's clear that you can write user defined functions in SQL Server that are marked as either deterministic or nondeterministic depending on which built-infunctions are used within the body. RAND() is listed under the nondeterministic functions (see msdn article ). So why can't I use it in a function? Because it has side effects. Constructs with side effects are not allowed in a function. The side effect that it has is to change some internal state that keeps track of the last rand() value issued. I think you can get around it by including

Normally it is said that multi threaded programs are non-deterministic, meaning that if it crashes it will be next to impossible to recreate the error that caused the condition. One doesn't ever really know what thread is going to run next, and when it will be preempted again. Of course this has to do with the OS thread scheduling algorithm and the fact that one doesn't know what thread is going to be run next, and how long it will effectively run. Program execution order also plays a role as well, etc... But what if you had the algorithm used for thread scheduling and what if you could know

I have the following user-defined function: create function [dbo].[FullNameLastFirst] ( @IsPerson bit, @LastName nvarchar(100), @FirstName nvarchar(100) ) returns nvarchar(201) as begin declare @Result nvarchar(201) set @Result = (case when @IsPerson = 0 then @LastName else case when @FirstName = '' then @LastName else (@LastName + ' ' + @FirstName) end end) return @Result end I can't create an Index on a computed column using this function cause it's not deterministic. Someone could explain why is it not deterministic and eventually how to modify to make it deterministic? Thanks You just need