Hedges, Interspace, Layered, Transition, Poincaré

Hedges

Sometimes we have variable sequences of significant events even though we expect a particular constant number of such events in repeated normal and problem cases. For example, in repeated typical cases, we expect more than ten events, but in repeated abnormal cases, we expect just two events. The latter cases would indicate that something happened inside the processing of the second event. However, if one or more such cases contain three or four events, it would point to some external influence that aborted the sequence of events. We call such variable event sequences hedges from analogy with hedge variables or variadic variables. One recent example that we encountered involved multiple abnormal cases with just two events. We were about to investigate the internals of the second event but noticed that one of the cases contained three events. Further analysis indicated that some external processes aborted the whole sequence after reaching a specific timeout. In the case of three events, the first two happened too early, and that allowed for the third event to occur before the timeout was triggered.