tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14661951.post-1149290717176296422006-06-02T16:09:00.000-07:002006-06-02T16:25:17.196-07:00<span style="font-style: italic;"><blockquote>The general lesson that I take away from this bug is humility: It is hard to write even the smallest piece of code correctly, and our whole world runs on big, complex pieces of code.</blockquote></span><blockquote>--Joshua Bloch</blockquote> <a name="114926336657808713"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span>Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken.</a><a href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html"> Read all about it. </a><br /><br />This chastening reminder is handy when I get frustrated to the point of apoplexy over things like lost work due to Blogger bugs. And other human endeavors. Bloch also says:<br /><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">A bug can exist for half a century despite our best efforts to exterminate it. We must program carefully, defensively, and remain ever vigilant.</span></blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>A jagged little pill, especially for the <abbr title="Artificial Intelligence">AI</abbr> / singularity crowd.<br /><br />On the other hand, it makes me feel better that I can find two silver linings:<br /><ul><li>A constrained-wordsize (say 8 bits per word) test case could have found this bug with an exhaustive-search test script a long time ago, and that I can see that makes me feel retrospectively smart.</li><li>If God-knows-how-many smart folks could miss this one for four decades, maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself when I discover my own errors.</li></ul><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://gumptionology.blogspot.com/atom.xml>" title="Atom feed">Gump Site Feed</a></div>Nortius Maximushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06980364619036821224noreply@blogger.com