---
title: Panel of Judges
date: 2026-07-16
layout: column.njk
tags: [column, computing]
permalink: /columns/2026/panel-of-judges/
---

Been a month - wild, unverified ideas

1. How could quantum computing impact LLMs, or other probablistic, non-deterministic models?

2. Can we put type safety, reliability features around LLM invocations? Can we formalize it, as its own kind of process: sequential or concurrent invocations of asynchronous processes.

We do that already with RPCs, web requests, etc.

what are some safety patterns around `async await`?
* timeouts
    - can we explicitly prompt the LLM: You have 500ms to respond or we move on?
    - Like an ad network bid: "winning" response wins
    - How are they compared? Panel of judges
        - At first I thought you could single "identical" judges in front of each submission
            - that's counting on each to be trustworthy
        - Then I thought about having a panel of judges, quorum style
        - Then I thought about a "ranking funnel" a shrinking pool, maybe bracket style (is that a merge-sort elimination?)
            - or you grade pools of responses as a collection, instead of individually (can't tell if this would be a fidelity loss or win - would that matter?)
    - this sounds really expensive: time and resources
        - 1/N success rate, and what does it take to eliminate the other N-1?
    - it sounds much less efficient than developing / evolving a single model session (some kind of hybrid) as long as it survives (and maybe each session can determine that for itself).
    - LLM (lives) are not precious. They can off themselves.
* exception handling // what's exceptional when prompting an LLM?
* validations / sanitation