(Ironically, the anomaly Agent Smith was the creation of the then current The One, the solution to solving the original systemic anomaly). Which was sort of solved by creating the notion of The One. Agent Smith.Īnd before that, the Matrix was bugged by another systemic anomaly. In the end, the entire Matrix was bugged by an anomaly. What if Newtonian physics didn’t exist? If the imperial system or the metric system wasn’t invented, would the Architect invent some other measurement system? The Architect simulated the “real” world flawlessly, but only so far as human knowledge goes. Right down to leaves falling and wind blowing in your face and steak tasting like steak (and not chicken) and pigeons flying like they’re supposed to.īut the Architect is also the creation of a human being.
Polymath software for mac software#
The Architect in The Matrix designed all the software in the world of Matrix (ok, maybe there’s delegation…). Software anomalies (read: bugs) aren’t so easily absorbed… With the world increasingly overrun by software, where medical devices, stock markets, airline ticket prices (supposedly tuned by software to remain competitive by comparing prices of other airlines), traffic lights, cars (Google cars are driven by software), online commerce and possibly even your toaster (if it isn’t already wired to the Internet), software anomalies can have a huge impact.
Hey this mammalian species looks interesting. Entire species of dinosaurs dying out? No problem. Mother Nature takes care of anomalies in her stride. If the developer didn’t remember to put in the laws of gravity, that cannonball would’ve fired straight into space instead of landing nicely on the enemy tanks in that simulation war game. Well, everything that the developer is aware of anyway. Rice wrote that writing software was akin to creating an entire world in which the developer was, well, the supreme being.Įvery single rule is determined by the developer. I’m continuing sort of a discussion of the book “Geekonomics” by David Rice. Sometimes, I think developers forget the entire infinity of numbers on the other side of the real line… My point is that unthinkable input values are always possible. Let me tell you, finance people are getting blase with the number of zeroes in financial figures, but put one hyphen in front of a number and the whole financial sector goes into collective apoplexy. Say we calculated last month’s settlement wrongly and we’re correcting that this month *cough*. It means our company had to pay the content provider more money. The product manager thought about it, and said yes, it could be negative.
“Can this value be negative?” asked my colleague. Since I wasn’t the senior developer there, I decided to voice the concern to my colleague later on. So the adjustment had to be a line item on the settlement report. They’d want to know why they’re receiving less money. You know, in case something happens and we should bill the content provider more, meaning we share less revenue with them.īut you know, you can’t just give the content provider a net number. The value in question was that the product manager wanted to have a mechanism for him to introduce adjustments.
The ideal situation was that all the numbers are nice and neat, people pay on time, everyone plays nice and so on and so forth.
We charge the public customers for the content, then we share the revenue with the content providers. The software application was to calculate settlement revenue between our company and our company’s partners, who were content providers. We were in a meeting with a product manager to get project requirements.
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