Monday, August 14, 2006

That perfect combination of bits...

In Sanjay's (a collegue) words, thats what most people in my industry are working towards. A cool thought. I write code for a living. It is compiled, linked and blah-blahed and what eventually comes out is a series of bits which represent instructions or data. A bunch of testers try and break it, report problems, and i fix them, by indirectly modifying that bit pattern a little. In essence, we are all working towards that perfect combination of bits.
In one of the many time-pass office discussions, we ended up wondering if we shud try and write buggy code to start with(which we do anyways) and thereon automate the modification of the bit-pattern iteratively, load it on the hardware and have automated regression scripts validate it till we hit upon that perfect combination. The assumption here is that the starting bit-pattern is somewhere in the vicinity of the ideal bit-pattern and we would converge in finite time. Well, once the coffee got consumed we got back to work. But i liked the idea, and might want to try it on a simple problem sometime. And Sanjay continues to deserve the name we gave him (Sanjay Mokkasamy....Mokka vaguely means the act of talking incessantly about random things).