Definition
Plain language
Listing out every item that belongs in a group, one by one.
As stated in the literature
Explicitly emitting all members of a set, as opposed to characterizing it with a rule; for autoregressive models this couples member selection with an uncalibrated stopping decision.
Also called: enumerate, enumerating, enumerated
Why it matters: Listing forces two separate judgments — what to include and when to stop — and the stopping judgment is the one models are worst at, so lists come back short.
For example, instead of saying "all the even numbers under ten," enumeration means writing out 2, 4, 6, 8 and then deciding, on your own, that you are done.
Heard on the show
“Checking a finite model of one is just brute-force enumeration.”Episode 034 — Catching Multi-Agent Deadlocks Before Deployment With a 40-Year-Old Tool