0 used to ask about something that could happen in the future, especially something bad:
1 used for asking what action to take if a particular thing should happen:
What if our plane is delayed and we can’t make the connection?
2 a question about what could happen or what could have happened in a particular situation if something was or had been different:
This is useful not only for debugging the application but also for analyzing 'what-if scenarios'.
Under the what-if scenario, it may even be necessary to role back the current state of an object to some previous state.
One manifestation of this last point is the difficulty of determining precisely what-if any-natural language processing is being used in the products on offer.
The system can use a similar process to perform a what-if analysis, as in a spreadsheet.
They propose a what-if approach that allows interactive exploration of the effects of system changes, thus converting complex tuning problems into simpler search problems.
The latter is used to explore how sensitive a design is to changes in parameter values by means of conventional "what-if" analyses.
Because it allows for what-if reasoning, scenario generation is considered an easy tool to facilitate discussions with trustees.
A what-if-query was a hypothetical look downstream of some temporary setting of a variable.