Writing "About Right" as a Tolerance Range
■ The same "50 g" means different things for different foods Potato salad can be portioned to the gram, so "50 g" is an instruction a machine can carry out. Fried chicken cannot. One piece weighs 32 g, two weigh 68 g. The food itself offers no way to land on 50 g.
■ People quietly reinterpret, while machines search for the exact value Told "50 g of karaage," a person reads "about two pieces," with an unspoken margin built in. A machine has no such margin. It keeps searching for 50 g, adding and removing pieces until it stops.
■ Conclusion: Define standards as countable units with an acceptable range The night-shift worker rewrote the order: two pieces, anywhere from 45 to 70 g. With a unit to count and a range to accept, the robot could judge every container. A quality standard is not an ideal value. It is a pass condition a machine can check. "Just right" is not a single number, but a range.
