@regehr article ok but. i don't understand why these metric-providers need to be called "oracles". it's the same pretension as the use of the word "story" in ticket systems. oracles deliver divine prophecies. what these things do is underwhelming in comparison. it irritates me greatly.

@lritter this is the standard term from software testing

@regehr @lritter to be fair, I think the original usage goes back to things like non-deterministic Turing machines, where an Oracle whispers to you the exact right sequence of non-deterministic choices to make to get the result you want, and in that case (certainly in the presence of things like uncomputability etc.) some form of divine intervention (or at least divine wisdom) might legitimately be required.

@regehr @lritter it's just like with anything, you start up building a religion to give you divine input to find a counterexample to the Goldbach Conjecture or whatever, but once the infrastructure exists and works you stop asking the Oracle questions like "what is the meaning of life" and start asking it questions like "is it sunny outside? I can't be bothered to pull back the curtains"

@rygorous @lritter the specific software testing usage seems to be from 1978

@regehr @lritter Don't know when complexity theorists started using it, but evidently it was already standard terminology by 1973: https://web.archive.org/web/20230319210201/https://cse.ucdenver.edu/~cscialtman/complexity/Relativizations%20of%20the%20P=NP%20Question%20(Original).pdf (see usage on first page)

@regehr @lritter Turing used it in this sense in https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2403325_2/component/file_2403324/content (1939, p.40 in PDF) so it seems safe to say that usage of the term is about as old as CS itself, if not older

@rygorous @regehr wow. i got 429ed on my second click. this is where we are now.