I recently came across a strange concept and was wondering if this was a known / named concept in the realm of CS.
The concept is that you evaluate some computation or logical circuit that takes in N number of binary inputs and gives an output. (and if doing multiple of these in parallel it could then be N inputs to M outputs)
You can then change your mind after the fact about the values of the binary inputs you want the algorithm to have evaluated and essentially re-interpret the result of the original equation to get the answer for those different inputs.
The benefit here would be that if there was some complex and lengthy computation, that you could do it once, and then just re-interpret the result to get the answer of that same algorithm for different inputs.
It sounds strange I know, but are there any existing methods for this, or terminology at least?
Example:
As an example let's say you calculated a function $f(x) = x * 8$ for $x=5$ in a specific way that gave you a resulting bit string. When an operation was done on the bit string, which was a function of the inputs (say, XOR against a number which was the function of the inputs for example), that the value came out to be 40.
But then, you say "OK but what would it be for $f(6)$?". Since 6 is different than 5, the XOR constant changes, but you can use that new XOR constant against the result you already got from the previous calculations, to get the new correct answer of 48.
The decoding process is the same regardless of the algorithm/function being evaluated. It is a function of the inputs, and has nothing to do with the details of the function itself (so isn't iterative computation).
it almost seems a little related to a karnaugh map, in that you get something boiled down to the results of the algorithm, no matter how complex the steps were to get to that result originally.