andygates: (Default)
andygates ([personal profile] andygates) wrote2006-08-30 02:28 pm

Quantum Software

That is to say, software in which the act of observation has, through apparently acausal means, an effect on the behaviour being observed.

Don't you just hate it?

[identity profile] thudthwacker.livejournal.com 2006-08-30 02:15 pm (UTC)(link)
A, you refer of course to the classical heisenbug. Or at least a behavior resulting from similar principles.

And, while I hate such things, I have personally had more experience with shroedinbugs, but usually in my favor. One concrete example was in a mass username change we were doing on our old VAXen (maytheyrestinpeace), and one of the several hundred changes didn't work exactly right. Upon investigation, I found that my code was utterly broken, and should have hopelessly wrecked every last account that I had changed, and indeed running the code in debug mode showed that it never, ever did the right thing. Why it worked flawlessly on the first run remains a mystery to this day, but I've decided to call it a blessing from Eris and not worry overmuch about it.