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lessdazed comments on When programs have to work-- lessons from NASA - Less Wrong
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Is there a third team making what looks like real code, with errors hidden as cleverly as possible, that is given to the debugging team and not distinguished from real lines of code?
If not, why not?
I told my PhD advisor that I had inserted the sentence "The whale is the largest living mammal." somewhere in my thesis about superconducting devices. I then did NOT insert the sentence. My theory was if I had put the sentence in then he would have realized he could stop reading so carefully once he found it.
How did this go over with your advisor? (Serious question.)
He was a tenured professor that ran large observatories. He was always more interested in what I could do technically than in whether I approved of him or not. I don't think he paid any attention to my comment about the whale, although he did give me good comments on my thesis.
I did include quotes from "Moby Dick" at the tops of some of the chapters, including "...I hold that the Whale is a fish [not an animal]..." whcih I had at the top of a chapter which was the quantum theory of the SIS device I was working with. So there were whale quotes in there for him :)
That would consume development and testing resources that could be put to better use. For example:
That is called Crazy Prepared.
This very system was responsible for the failure of the first shuttle launch. It turns out that there was a 1/64 chance that the clocks in the primary system and the clocks in the BFS would fail to synchronize on startup, and the very first scheduled launch hit the jackpot: the clocks didn't sync, and NASA had to scrub the mission, and spend weeks figuring out what went wrong.
Interesting, I didn't know that! Wikipedia says "A launch attempt two days earlier was scrubbed because of a timing problem in one of Columbia’s general-purpose computers." and NASA says "Launch April 10 postponed due to timing skew in orbiter's general purpose computer system. Backup flight software failed to synchronize with primary avionics software system.", but this article explains the problem in extreme detail.