Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Geek: Oopsie. Major oopsie!

Geek:  Oopsie.  Major oopsie!  The basic sort library functions in Java (including Android) and Python are broken.  Broken as in they can sometimes crash, given the right inputs.  Java's sort implementation is over ten years old, and (to the best of my knowledge) this bug hasn't been reported before.  One particularly interesting aspect is that the bug was found during an attempt to formally prove the algorithm's correctness.  If you're not a computer science geek, you might not realize just how difficult proving correctness is.  In fact it is so difficult that almost exactly zero of the software you use everyday is proven to be correct...

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