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| Bugs; we've all got them | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 8 2006, 06:32 AM (73 Views) | |
| big al | Jun 8 2006, 06:32 AM Post #1 |
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Bull-Carp
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Bugs: Mathematical fabric of the universe All of the complicated software programs churning away in your computer have bugs. All of them. Guaranteed. “Software bugs are part of the mathematical fabric of the universe,” said Ben Liblit, a University of Wisconsin-Madison computer scientist. “It is impossible with a capital ‘I’ to detect or anticipate all bugs.” The staggering complexity of software is only part of the issue, he explains. Software has so many different points of interaction—with hardware, with networks, with other software, and mostly with humans—that opportunities for buggy behavior abound. “That behavior is so dynamic that it becomes useful to look at [software programs] almost like they were some sort of organic system, whose complete behavior is unknowable to you,” said Liblit. “But there are behavior trends you can observe in a statistically significant way.” Liblit takes that metaphor literally in his research, known as the “Cooperative Bug Isolation Project.” Combining programming languages and software engineering with a dose of machine learning, Liblit has enlisted real software users to tell him where the bugs are. Moreover, he has a growing “kill board” as evidence the idea works. Liblit has created lightweight instrumentation that adds into the binary language of software. The instrumentation creates a sparse, but statistically fair, random sample of software behavior, while also protecting user privacy. The system produces regular “feedback reports” across the thousands of software programs that are in use. All of those reports feed into a powerful database that accumulates the data and starts to identify trends. Then, through statistical modeling techniques, Liblit is able to pinpoint software bugs that are occurring with enough regularity to affect many users. The final step in the feedback loop is a bug report, prepared by Liblit and sent back to the software engineers capable of acting on the results. Will software development ever reach a level of sophistication that would render Liblit’s bug machine obsolete? Liblit said that scenario is unlikely. Given that software becomes vastly more complicated with each generation, his better guess is that the industry is maintaining an even keel. Source here: Bugs: Mathematical fabric of the universe Big Al |
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Location: Western PA "jesu, der simcha fun der man's farlangen." -bachophile | |
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| Aqua Letifer | Jun 8 2006, 07:12 AM Post #2 |
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ZOOOOOM!
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Thanks for the reading, big al. Good stuff. ![]() However, I'd say that not only do random errors and variations have thier own place in the universe, I'd say that most (if not all) of them aren't as random as we think they are. http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v1/n2/full/nphys162.html |
| I cite irreconcilable differences. | |
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