Morendil comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 01 August 2010 01:27PM

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Comment author: Morendil 02 August 2010 09:45:57PM 2 points [-]

It is a lot easier to make a random mess of ASCII that crashes or loops - and yet software companies still manage to ship working products.

Still, a lot of these "working products" are the output of a filtering process which starts from a random mess of ASCII that crashes or loops, and tweaks it until it's less obviously broken. (Most of the job of testing being, typically, left to the end user.)

Comment author: timtyler 02 August 2010 09:57:19PM *  1 point [-]

Sure. The point is that - to conclude that a target will be missed - it is not sufficient to observe how small it is. Programmers rountinely hit miniscule targets in search spaces. To make the case, you would also need to argue that those aiming at the target are not good marksmen.