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).

4 comments:

Blah! said...
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Blah! said...

reminds me of how wikipedia works. you can write an erroneous entry, but after a few hundred edits by the community, you get a close to perfect article.
anyways, i guess in a way, its like trying to create the perfect human genome, not really that complicated but close enough! i have had such weird ideas once upon a time, but i just let it linger inside...
and forgot to ask, periya bidika nee, busy madhiri rouse vidara!

Anonymous said...

something like this?

Anonymous said...

something like this? (if the link does not appear, google for Genetic Programming)