262 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? =" LP SS es es ee } t ir } is ike 3 i 1| ~~ KEN WATSON BE , i r = © 7, foe * a = ay iP £ — “¥ | 5 4 - a _ - = yr { hi ‘ .. a4 : Watson and Our Future? computing power and therefore universal knowledge. This could herald a Utopian future; global warming, cancer, all things of the past. But computers might just as easily become bored and determine we humans are the real problem. If we are lucky, they may treat us as amusing pets. If we are unlucky... These consequences might have come to pass if the answer to the Halting Problem were ‘yes’ but as the answer is ‘no! This is not the future we face. Mummy, where do Bugs Come From? One consequence of the logic limit provides a theoretical basis for the origin of computer bugs. The mention of ‘bug’ conjures up stories of dead creepy crawlies stuck in early computer circuits, but the term had been in use for over 150 years before the computer was even invented. Bugs are not simply annoying mistakes.If you misspell my name as Stagg instead of Tagg that’s just carelessness. Real flaws creep into a computer program when you fail to understand Brooks’ essential complexity, or by my terminology, you stray above the logic limit without realizing it. Imagine we have created a piece of software. The software goes into test and is subjected to a range of use cases. Some of these will fail because we did not take into account all the real world possibilities. Then a strange thing happens. We get trapped in a loop of patching the errors in the program in a rather mechanical way. Find an error, patch HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015952