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Hindsight: Reversible Computing

Posted by Hemos on from the step-back-into-the-past dept.

One of the more interesting tech pieces that came out this week has been Hindsight [PDF]. Hindsight is made by Virtutech and is billed as the "the first complete, general-purpose tool for reverse execution and debugging of arbitrary electronic systems." The demos were received extremely well and it just looks cool.

1 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Too good to be true... by Leadhyena · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I can see how this software can come in real handy, but it won't work in every situation. It states in TFA that Hindsight doesn't do the naive approach of recording every instrction, but rather takes snapshots and tries to fill in the gaps. There are many types of calculations out there (think The Game of Life or other CAs) that by their nature cannot be reversed, so all of those states would have to be stored or it would be mathematically impossible to calculate the reverse steps.

    Therefore, I can't see their approach being foolproof, and the over-obvious advertisement (this is what normal debugging toolbars look like, but they don't have a nifty step-one-back feature) seems too bright to be withot caveat. At $5,000 a seat I'd say buyer beware.