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A SECURITY EXPLOIT. "Parasitic computing is programming technique where a program in normal authorized interactions with another program manages to get the other program to perform computations of a complex nature. It is, in a sense, a security exploit in that the program implementing the parasitic computing has no authority to consume resources made available to the other program." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_computing 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

SO ENDS this two weekend venture into the theme of coevolution. Clearly, this story is far from over, and there is more to learn. It is interesting to imagine that man and machine may one day coevolve when Artificial Intelligence gains its inevitable autonomy, and when flesh and machine inevitably become more entwined. So far, the story of coevolution in biology has been limited to closely interacting species, such as the microbiome and the host, but this will expand one day to extraordinary realms. 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

NEXT LEVEL UP. "The social structure of the hive is transmitted epigenetically across generations, and the honeybee genome is an adaptation to the social structure laid down in the distant past." http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1566/878 View in LinkedIn

NEURAL NETWORKS. "We have to aggressively avoid interconnections and side effects (this is taken to an extreme in functional programming, where no side effects are allowed). We also struggle with parallel programming, such that very few people actually know how to do it well. Nature doesn't give a shit about these limitations. The brain is a massively parallel pile of spaghetti code." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

SPAGHETTI CODE. "In software, we call code that has too many interconnections "spaghetti code", and it's notorious for quickly exceeding the ability for humans to reason about it." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

REDUCTIVE THINKING. "Our finite intelligence requires human engineers to use a divide and conquer approach to problem solving, where we break down problems into smaller problems that we can understand." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

LIMITS OF HUMAN SMARTS. -- "it is the fundamental tenet of science that nothing is impossible to understand."" "-- "That's nonsense. It's a fervent hope that nothing is impossible to understand, we have no choice but to operate as if this were true, but it's a fact that human intelligence has finite limits. I'm a computer scientist: those limits are a gating factor in this industry." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

THE GIST. "There is a difference between 100 million lines of code that no one person understands... and 10 lines of code no one can understand." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn