I was recently at lunch with a coach. It was a good lunch, mostly because of the conversation and the company. Ginger asked me the following question:

"What is 'state resolution'?" Now she was obviously referring to  one of my earlier posts about my desire to wring out ambiguity where it makes sense. However, it got me thinking about the common vernacular we use in our day to day communications with our peer group. In the lexicon of a quantum physicist, "State Resolution" pretty clearly points towards Schrödinger's cat and the relative superposition of quantum states until one collapses the probability field by measuring (open the box and check for relative dead cat-ness (yes I do make up words, consider it my contribution to humanity)).

In computer science, we commonly understand the machine to be in one of several states (arbitrarily many depending on the state definition engine, but finite) but ultimately, at the microscopic level, a bit is either 0 or 1, true or false, or or off. The way we determine state is by a typical GetState() function. I could wax philosophic about state checking, state machines and various other topic associated with state checking, locking functions, guaranteed state and so on, but, that misses the point.

Simply put, state resolution translates into "determine the answer of something", when possible. Frankly, if we can answer a question definitively we can move on. This is not in conflict with my relative comfort with ambiguity. Ambiguity is ubiquitous in our day to day life. However, ambiguity for the sake of ambiguity or because it serves to cloud judgment, persist in artificial structures or not serve the common good needs to be resolved. Yes, I am comfortable with ambiguity if the question is essentially unanswerable, doesn't resolve the larger issue or would require too much effort to resolve (ROI calculation). That being said, if we can answer the question (resolve state), we should.

And so I learned something. Probably obvious, but, we need to make sure we communicate our complex ideas such that others can "pull the thread" and determine what we mean.