Month: September 2022

SIGNAL NOISE. "Many communication channels are subject to channel noise, and thus errors may be introduced during transmission from the source to a receiver. Error detection techniques allow detecting such errors, while error correction enables reconstruction of the original data in many cases." https://lnkd.in/dA7ruzn View in LinkedIn

COMPUTER ERRORS can be serious. “Knight Capital Group, a market-making firm that until August 2012 had a stellar reputation in its industry, blew all of that in about 30 minutes. Between 9:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. EST on August 1, the company’s trading algorithms got a little buggy and decided to buy high and sell low on 150 different stocks. By the time the bleeding had stopped, KCG had lost $440 million on trades.” https://lnkd.in/dAbKmAG View in LinkedIn

MORE SERIOUS BUG STORIES. “The 1996 maiden flight of the European Space Agency's state-of-the-art Ariane 5 rocket ended in a spectacular explosion over French Guiana. The rocket's inertial guidance system failed to convert a piece of data from a 64-bit format to a 16-bit format. Estimates on the cost of the lost rocket and cargo run to $500 million.” https://lnkd.in/d3YygPs View in LinkedIn

MASSIVE QUESTION. "Computer programming is all about putting human-derived algorithms or instructions into a binary code to make machines do what we want. Right? What if this purely logic and purely human system has parts that we do not understand? What would that mean if it was not just programmer error (which happens massively)?" https://lnkd.in/de4Pasi View in LinkedIn

LOGIC IS INSUFFICIENT. "1960s and 1970s. Back then, many thought that general-purpose AI could be achieved purely through symbolic manipulation. That is, it was thought that we could build machines that, through purely logical reasoning, would derive a sufficient understanding of the world to reach and even exceed human intelligence." https://pointersgonewild.com/ View in LinkedIn

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

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

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

LOGICAL BREAKDOWNS. "Everybody who learns concurrency thinks they understand it, ends up finding mysterious races they thought weren’t possible, and discovers that they didn’t actually understand it yet after all." (Herb Sutter, chair of the ISO C++ standards committee, Microsoft). View in LinkedIn