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Doyle's catch refers to the latent difficulty in the deployment and adoption of autonomous system validated by simulations in the real world. It is named after American electrical and control engineer John C. Doyle, who described the background in 2010 along with David L. Alderson. [1]
The description of the difficulty is described by safety researcher David Woods as: [2]
Computer-based simulation and rapid prototyping tools are now broadly available and powerful enough that it is relatively easy to demonstrate almost anything, provided that conditions are made sufficiently idealized. However, the real world is typically far from idealized, and thus a system must have enough robustness in order to close the gap between demonstration and the real thing.