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FRAGMENT FROM NATURE deals with the concept of imperfection in nature. Darwin had a massive influence on the subject, even though he broke with an even stronger world view before him that was based on a religious view. Even today, we have an underlying and often unspoken assumption that nature is always striving towards perfection, and these ideas are rooted in the past rather than reality. View in LinkedIn

THE 500 MILE EMAIL is a cute story about a perplexing problem caused by programmer error. http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html View in LinkedIn

BUILT-IN BUG PATHS. "It's important to add that using those defects (instead of designing around them like humans do) can lead to improper work quite easily, depending on stability of the power supply, temperature or magnetic field." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

MYR PROCESSOR YEARS. "Sure, if you write a mutation algorithm that silently runs for a few million processor-years, sure you won't understand the result... but that's a fault of your programming." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

WORKAROUNDS. "There are other electrical things going on (capacitance, crosstalk, etc) in chips that we normally design around." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

DEDUCTIVE THINKING. "Any algorithm whose result you cannot predict or understand was poorly coded, even with 'random' evolution bits. It comes down to reporting and logging; a genetic algorithm should report when it gets a certain good result from a mutation, and you should log enough of these mutations to analyze trends. At the end you should know how each piece of the computer generated architecture evolved." https://lnkd.in/dEAsbig View in LinkedIn

ODD ROOT CAUSES. "A bunch of people had disconnections at a certain location, I looked at area on google maps and street view. Found a morgue called them up, and asked what time they run the electric furnaces for burning bodies. Another fault was clustered around a military base on radio frequencies that were not military reserved." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

BACKROOM CHATTER by coders and hackers gives an insight into the real life problems associated with coding. View in LinkedIn

THE ODD AND THE WEIRD. "In troubleshooting, so many symptoms are discarded as they are illogical, but I've often had the really hard problems while at a large telco, and we get some very weird symptoms that lead to some odd root causes." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

DR THOMPSON'S OFFSPRING. "Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest-- with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output-- yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn