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The Evolution of Software

Posted by michael on from the growing-feathers dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Russian physicists Gorshenev and Pis'mak have posted a preprint claiming evidence that software projects naturally attain a state of self-organized criticality, in a process analogous to the contested theory of punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution (see also this paper by Bak and Boettcher). The software projects studied are FreeBSD, Mozilla, and GNU Emacs, by analyzing data from their CVS checkins."

2 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Correction by OECD · · Score: 4, Funny

    Russian physicists Gorshenev and Pis'mak...

    Gorshenev is a Russian, but I'm pretty sure Pis'mak is a Vulcan.

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    One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
  2. Re:Not a large stretch of the imagination by Arandir · · Score: 3, Funny

    Here's the real story:

    I've spent every minute of available free time for the past two months hacking on my project. I've finally uploaded libfu-3.2.7 final. My eyes don't focus, my girlfriend left me, and my cat stopped leaving dead mice in my slippers. So for the next two months I'm not touching any code.

    That's why you get punctuated equilibrium.

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    A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned