Cryptic genetic variation in software: hunting a buffered 41 year old bug by Sean Eddy.
From the post:
In genetics, cryptic genetic variation means that a genome can contain mutations whose phenotypic effects are invisible because they are suppressed or buffered, but under rare conditions they become visible and subject to selection pressure.
In software code, engineers sometimes also face the nightmare of a bug in one routine that has no visible effect because of a compensatory bug elsewhere. You fix the other routine, and suddenly the first routine starts failing for an apparently unrelated reason. Epistasis sucks.
I’ve just found an example in our code, and traced the origin of the problem back 41 years to the algorithm’s description in a 1973 applied mathematics paper. The algorithm — for sampling from a Gaussian distribution — is used worldwide, because it’s implemented in the venerable RANLIB software library still used in lots of numerical codebases, including GNU Octave. It looks to me that the only reason code has been working is that a compensatory “mutation” has been selected for in everyone else’s code except mine.
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A bug hunting story to read and forward! Sean just bagged a forty-one (41) year old bug. What’s the oldest bug you have ever found?
When you reach the crux of the problem, you will understand why ambiguous, vague, incomplete and poorly organized standards annoy me to no end.
No guarantees of unambiguous results but if you need extra eyes on IT standards you know where to find me.
I first saw this in a tweet by Neil Saunders.