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Fixing Bugs, But Bypassing the Source Code

Posted by timothy on from the wrapping-puzzles-in-enigmas dept.

shreshtha contributes this snippet from MIT's Technology Review: "Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT, is unabashed about the ultimate goal of his group's research: 'delivering an immortal, invulnerable program.' In work presented this month at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Big Sky, MT, his group has developed software that can find and fix certain types of software bugs within a matter of minutes." Interestingly, this software doesn't need access to the source code of the target program.

2 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Re:MS will probably kill it by SnarfQuest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If MS included this in Windows, you'd never get to see the login screen because the CPU would be so busy fixing bugs.

    --
    Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
  2. Re:Did they use that tool to develop that tool? by Wonko+the+Sane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The fiendish prof announced that he will run that code through itself. Whatever letter grade it spits out will be his thesis grade. He got a D. He begged and cried and threw a hissy fit and wangled a B and scraped through the degree.

    Fiendish? What could possibly be more fair and objective than making him eat his own dogfood?