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Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Sophisticated Piece of Software Ever Written? (quora.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Stuxnet is the most sophisticated piece of software ever written, given the difficulty of the objective: Deny Iran's efforts to obtain weapons grade uranium without need for diplomacy or use of force, John Byrd, CEO of Gigantic Software (formerly Director of Sega and SPM at EA), argues in a blog post, which is being widely shared in developer circles, with most agreeing with Byrd's conclusion.
He writes, "It's a computer worm. The worm was written, probably, between 2005 and 2010. Because the worm is so complex and sophisticated, I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does. This worm exists first on a USB drive. Someone could just find that USB drive laying around, or get it in the mail, and wonder what was on it. When that USB drive is inserted into a Windows PC, without the user knowing it, that worm will quietly run itself, and copy itself to that PC. It has at least three ways of trying to get itself to run. If one way doesn't work, it tries another. At least two of these methods to launch itself were completely new then, and both of them used two independent, secret bugs in Windows that no one else knew about, until this worm came along."
"Once the worm runs itself on a PC, it tries to get administrator access on that PC. It doesn't mind if there's antivirus software installed -- the worm can sneak around most antivirus software. Then, based on the version of Windows it's running on, the worm will try one of two previously unknown methods of getting that administrator access on that PC. Until this worm was released, no one knew about these secret bugs in Windows either. At this point, the worm is now able to cover its tracks by getting underneath the operating system, so that no antivirus software can detect that it exists. It binds itself secretly to that PC, so that even if you look on the disk for where the worm should be, you will see nothing. This worm hides so well, that the worm ran around the Internet for over a year without any security company in the world recognizing that it even existed." What do Slashdot readers think?
He writes, "It's a computer worm. The worm was written, probably, between 2005 and 2010. Because the worm is so complex and sophisticated, I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does. This worm exists first on a USB drive. Someone could just find that USB drive laying around, or get it in the mail, and wonder what was on it. When that USB drive is inserted into a Windows PC, without the user knowing it, that worm will quietly run itself, and copy itself to that PC. It has at least three ways of trying to get itself to run. If one way doesn't work, it tries another. At least two of these methods to launch itself were completely new then, and both of them used two independent, secret bugs in Windows that no one else knew about, until this worm came along."
"Once the worm runs itself on a PC, it tries to get administrator access on that PC. It doesn't mind if there's antivirus software installed -- the worm can sneak around most antivirus software. Then, based on the version of Windows it's running on, the worm will try one of two previously unknown methods of getting that administrator access on that PC. Until this worm was released, no one knew about these secret bugs in Windows either. At this point, the worm is now able to cover its tracks by getting underneath the operating system, so that no antivirus software can detect that it exists. It binds itself secretly to that PC, so that even if you look on the disk for where the worm should be, you will see nothing. This worm hides so well, that the worm ran around the Internet for over a year without any security company in the world recognizing that it even existed." What do Slashdot readers think?
"Hello world"...it's everywhere, it runs on all platforms and has been translated into every major language.
It depends on what you mean by sophisticated:
If you mean something that does a lot of functions, then I would probably propose Busybox or emacs.
If you mean something cleverly engineered to handle a lot of attacks, pgp, TrueCrypt, and VeraCrypt come to mind.
If you mean something that makes a framework, Kubernates can be considered there.
Then, there are hypervisors that wind up not just doing the functions of an operating system, but providing the same functions to an OS.
I just read this elsewhere.... why am i here?
The software in the Apollo moon lander is probably one of the most qualified in this category considering that it had to be reliable and it was used in a solution that couldn't be tested for all eventualities on Earth.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If (8==D) {
System.out.println("~~~");
}
Thank me later for automating the Internet.
It has to support over a billion different conputers with different drivers and hardware plus support decades of backward compatbility. Android/Linux come close.
The GNU Compiler Collection, although this may depend on what you mean by "sophisticated".
Who ordered that?
"It has to support over a billion different" security bugs
cause can't do stuxnet without windows.
i for one am waiting on the win10 bugs relase notes by stuxnet2
I mean what will those Silicon Valley geniuses think up next?
By that analogy, the Micosoft Windows becomes the most sophisticated piece of software.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Human DNA is the most impressive software ever written. It uses extremely complex feedback control structures, analog and digital. It has also lent its name to "genetic algorithms". It is a simple construct but so complex that we have barely understood the outlines of it after five decades of global research. It may not be "written", but that's another story.
Stuxnet on the other hand is a rather short piece of code that based its success on using secrets obtained from external sources. A good example of cross-domain collaboration and a masterpiece in its own domain. But hardly the most sophisticated piece of code ever written.
The meaning of "sophisticated" will influence the answer. But if we go with a combination of many different uses, complexity and nuanced output, then I would suggest one of those two categories would take the title.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The landing software of the Curiosity rover. Not only did it need to land on Mars, it did it in a highly complex sequence, fully automated, in conditions impossible to simulate and fully replicate here on Earth prior to launch. The distance from Earth also ment the signals confirming (or denying) a successful landing, took 14 minutes to reach the Earth.
It can do it all, from simple Tic Tac Toe to Global Thermonuclear War.
So sophisticated it's impossible to add proper Unicode support.
Hands down.... nothing we've written ourselves comes close to it.
While perhaps not exactly "written", per se.... it still seems very much like software.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
People have already commented on other (RTOS) apps etc.
But how about this, for its time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
seL4 microkernel, which is formally verified (algorithmically proven that all it's functions are correct)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#High_assurance:_seL4
I think you could consider when the software was made. For instance, VMS was an incredibly advanced, scalable OS with partitioning and virtualization features, an advanced filesystem (current filesystems are still catching up in some ways) designed to run on hardware less capable than most smartwatches today.
"It has to support over a billion different" security bugs
Honestly, I'd consider Windows in the running for this reason alone (seriously.) They have rolling backdoors which change with each update such that they always have a way into client machines without usually letting a "bug" sit in the wild long enough to be exploited by other parties (at least, when you consider that they always have multiple backdoors in multiple layers of the OS.) It's a pretty sophisticated method, so much so most people will probably chalk the idea that it exists that way (it does) up as a conspiracy theory.
I've seen some ridiculous spreadsheets. Real works of art. Iterative computations, beautiful plots. So resource intense, it will bring a modern PC to its knees.
It's a shame someone wasted their talents on Microsoft Excel.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
MAME = stuxnet x 1000
COMSOL is a physics and chemistry finite element simulation package. it's a huge, monstrously big package comprised of an encompassing (and respectably well done) UI, a programming interface, and a large number of interlocking modules (interlocking done through the physical models the user creates). So it's rather challenging and sophisticated purely from a software point of view. But then you have to consider the fact that each module implements some very sophisticated computational math for solving some very sophisticated set of physical or chemical/physical equations.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm...
at the current pace, systemd will include all other software within the next 5 years, so by definition it will include the most sophisticated software ever devised
First lets define Sophisticated: "developed to a high degree of complexity"
Second, it would be impossible to any one person to accurately compare different pieces of software as it's too much information to know.
So, what software program has the highest degree of complexity? My first thought is Windows 10. Linux/Unix has a philosophy of lots of smaller programs combining together to make a useful system, even if we counted that, I think the Windows Core is more complex then the Linux kernel and Windows 10 is more complex then say Ubuntu.
But who knows what the department of defense has, the NSA, Google's algorithms, Amazon, YouTube, China, North Korea, Russia? The more I go down this rabbit hole the more I come back to my second statement: it is impossible for any one person to accurately compare them because no one person knows them all.
Contains nearly every aspect of the underlying layers it operates on. It has absolutely everything. Parsing, compiling, video, audio, input, networking. So complex it requires it's own scheduling in order to behave within the expected margins of behavior. Have you seen the list of extensions? GL canvases, SVG animations. Dynamic recompiling to native code.
Check out Fabrice Bellard's Javascript booting a linux image.
Web browser: anything, everything, and the kitchen sink.
The question implies that we know about all of the software that has ever been written. We don't. Therefore we cannot judge what the most sophisticated piece of software ever written is or was. We can, however, discuss software that is widely known about, known beyond a relatively few that wrote or used it.
Because the worm is so complex and sophisticated, I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does
Everything else aside, this is bullshit.
You could say "I don't know how it works, so I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does". No matter how complex a thing is, if you know it well enough, you can explain it to a 5 year old. And that has a cool feedback system that helps kids get smarter faster. Standing on shoulders of giants and all that.
The use of 4 zero-days is indeed pretty sophisticated. The rest is pretty run of the mill standard operation that would have been neat in the 90's. I think this guy just isn't familiar with the industry and was pretty amazed when he took the tour. That or it's more puffery.
Personally, I wouldn't count any layers underneath, or library calls or such, that a thing makes when trying to figure out complexity and sophistication. Otherwise we'd include EVERYTHING that goes into a linux distro. So early projects that had to do it themselves all by hand would be the most sophisticated. To that extent, I'd have to go with something from early NASA. The software for the Apollo program sounds good, solely form that one picture with Margret Hamilton and the stack of sourcecode. It got man on the moon, which is way more impressive than taking a metaphorical wrench to some centrifuges.
Hmmmm, I don't want to worship lines of code though... a really sophisticated piece of software would be short and sweet and do something amazing and new.
I would disagree as the LM software was pretty straightforward - no routines was started without the astronauts (and NASA) not knowing exactly what the current state of the LM was with expected parameters and then execute quite simple routines. Don't forget that the Apollo Guidance Computers (AGCs) in the LM and CM only had 32k of ROM and 2K of RAM.
The "1201" and "1202" issues encountered during the Apollo 11 descent are probably the best examples of what you're talking about. They were caused by Aldrin leaving the CM rendezvous radar on during descent (this was done in the simulator without any issues because the landing simulator didn't include this radar because the LM designers didn't think it would be used during landing). Input from the radar was continually passed to the computer even though the software was written to process it or take it out of the memory area that it was automatically stored in...
This is where the genius of the hardware came in, when the data area the extraneous radar data was dumped into (as I understand it, causing the equivalent of a stack overflow), instead of trying to resolve the issue (which is what I would consider sophisticated software to do) the computer reset itself while returning to the currently executing routine. The landing routine itself would continuously poll altitude and attitude which means that upon reset, it would re-establish where the LM was and make the necessary computations for the engines & thrusters as necessary.
So, the MIT engineers did design for the unknown and to compensate for it, it just wasn't in the software.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
(Human) DNA is an excellent example of some very sophisticated software.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Is a system I built to manipulate Google's search results. It was challenging because I had to utilize 3 different coding languages, one of which was an interpeter I wrote, among other things which I won't disclose here. The system is unstoppable.
i for one am waiting on the win10 bugs relase notes
Don't ask for a printout or it will bury you alive. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Whatever I wrote yesterday. I just looked at it and I don't understand what it does.
As others have pointed out it depends on what you mean by sophisticated. Several candidates come to mind though each are sophisticated for different reasons. This is obviously a very incomplete list.
1) The code to control the Space Shuttle
2) The code for the Voyager probes
3) The code controlling the Curiosity rover, particular the bit to land it
4) Emacs
5) Unix and derivatives
6) GNU software stack
7) Encryption software
8) Self driving car code
9) Cruise missile control code
10) Weather modeling code
11) Code to control the Large Hadron Collider
12) Microsoft Windows
13) Control software for the F22 and F35
14) Sonar code for navy nuclear submarines
15) TCP/IP
16) Code to evaluate the human genome and proteome.
17) Nuclear explosion simulation software
18) Code breaking software
I'd explain further but then have to kill you.
Depending on how you define "sophisticated", Stuxnet may or may not be very sophisticated. For example, a sophisticated program may be one that needs no documentation to be easily understood. Similarly, highly obfuscated code (such as http://udel.edu/~mm/xmas/) may be considered quite sophisticated.
So, where does exploiting OS bugs and writing USB malware lie on the sophisticated spectrum?
I always liked our old accounting system from the 80's on a mini-computer.
Full blown billing,inventory, and accounting system in 8 MB of programming.....that can only be used 32KB at a time!
Soooo many bits and pieces, all written in Basic no less, yet still almost indecipherable :O
I always liked to try and picture the flow chart.....
This idiot from Gigantic Software is a complete moron. Worse than a complete moron. He is so clueless, stupid, and uninformed that he is qualified only to be the CEO of a Cat Poop Tray. Otherwise, he should keep his ignorance (no, stupidity -- ignorance can be cured, stupidity is terminal) to himself.
Just because HE didn't know that Windows loves to swallow whatever is stuffed in its orifices does NOT MEAN that this was not common (very common) knowledge at the time. There was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING NEW OR NOVEL IN STUXNET that was not previously seen in, say, the Monkey Virus in the 1980's. Actually the Monkey Virus was far more virulent and "innovative" that STUXNET, which was nothing more than a cyberwarfare agent designed by a committee.
NeXTStep is the most sophisticated piece of software ever. It started out on 68k hardware, moved to x86 and ppc, then got a new couple of layers (Mac OS X), was ported to iOS, and is still going strong.
It could play games and learn that war is wrong.
QED
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
'nuff said.
From a high level view, an OS is a library, not a program. So they don't qualify.
Quirky or clever code does not qualify.
Reliability is all.
I think a really sophisticated program probably would be one where your bugs can kill you. I have worked on a few of those... 8-)
There's a lot of secret sophisticated software out there.
Windows is probably the most complex and advanced creation in the history of humankind...
I believe there is a piece of software out there that combines a bunch of other people's already created hosts files into one. This software has a GUI, is multi threaded, and even has its own internal database like functionality. All of that functionality was coded internally without using 3rd party libraries. Apparently this software is the single greatest security software as well. I hear it is so good that from time to time AV software vendors try to kill it by marking it as malware as it undercuts them.
Given the resources we of USG, this is easy to pull off. Just send your guys to msft for a job. They are then paid officially and secretly.
It was tailored based on known aspects of the system, and ferried in by some collaborator.
Measuring the "sophistication of the software" by the "difficulty of the objective" is stupid AF. Did the person who nominated stuxnet have any computer background whatsoever? Using these guidelines - a lazy, inefficient brute-force loop searching for a crypto key is surely the Most Sophisticated since the "difficulty of the objective" is measured in billions of years.
Google Search has been maybe ten thousand people working for more than a decade, and they're largely solid engineers.
I'm... guessing Stuxnet isn't within many orders of magnitude of that effort.
FizzBuzz
The crux of this question is the interpretation of the phrase "most sophisticated". I feel it has a density of complexity component. So I'd lean towards candidates that must perform complex tasks under difficult constraints, either physical or virtual.
It actually makes me think back to bygone days of trying to cram complex tasks into 8-bit embedded controllers.
A representative case that comes to mind was a function in an armament controller - the computer that controlled dropping dumb bombs from a fighter travelling 500+ miles an hour. The processor was an Intel 8080 in the days when 64K was a lot of memory. The specification we had to hit was for the bombs to hit the ground at the spacing dialed in, typically 50 or 100 ft, with +/- 1 foot of accuracy. We were not allowed to require that the plane be flying level or at constant speed. Also, when you drop a 2000 pound bomb off a wingtip, the plane lurches in the opposite direction so that the next one dropping from the other side a second later has an additional acceleration. These and other factors required that we be able to perform a multivariable integration problem in real time on an 8 bit processor running something like 5MHz with no floating point capability. It took a lot of thought, creativity, and simulation. Carefully constructed tables were used to speed the integration and a tremendous amount of trial and error to make it always converge. All of the code was in assembly language though it had been prototyped in a slightly higher level language that is likely long dead. But, the specification was met. That software was sophisticated. I've worked multi-million line projects since that didn't begin to approach the art that went into those KBs of assembly.
Other examples I'd think of are in the device logic arena, which I also consider software. Getting PLAs to perform more sophisticated operations often involved dispensing with synchronous logic and working in the asynchronous realm. Getting that to be stable across devices with gate speed variations could be pretty tricky, but the end result of having functions performed at throughput levels that others considered impossible at the time was oh so satisfying.
I can understand the anonymous reader's thoughts of the complexity of the worm. It has constraints that fall in that "virtual" arena. It must do its job without being detected until it is too late or having a signature that indisputably reveals its creator. That is very challenging. The task of creating software like that is more art than science. Requiring "art" is also a very necessary component of "most sophisticated" IMO.
Computer worm that sabotages meat world systems is a use of force. It's absurd to not expect a proportional retribution. These attitudes are what keep the conflict going indefinitely. But that is what we all want, isn't it? It makes us feel important to our communities.
They come pretty close and there's a ton of them.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I don't know how you would define 'sophisticated' or 'software' but allow me to tell you about some software I like by creating my own definitions.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I would suspect that this is the most sophisticated software ever written. It solves a huge range of mathematical problems, as well as graphical representations and a replacement rule engine which allows pretty much any paradigm (functional, procedural, etc.) to be represented.
This "most sophisticated software" question is from the same doofus who also asked / answered:
How is murdering people considered fun in video games? What happened to all those innocent games such as Frogger, Qbert, and Donkey Kong?
Apparently he doesn't understand games are an escape from reality and has to be told what fun is. Games are fun because we don't have to worry about real-life consequences and can do things that we normally could never do in physical reality, dumbass.
e.g. Frag my buddies, drive an expensive sports car, slay dragons, virtual fishing, etc.
Maybe he should go play DnD to actually learn the answer.
Genocide in video games isn't (solely) the problem when you want to take a break from the stress of day-to-day responsibility. It becomes a problem when you do that to the exclusion of all your other responsibilities.
If you don't like violence in games there are enough good puzzle games like The Witness, Pythagorea, Top 10 Geometric Puzzles for iOS (2016), etc.
To name just one example, like if you only have 48K minus screen memory and manage to put Knight Lore in it. The assembly of that one was a thing of genius.
What, you forgot?
How many malware infections happened, all thanks to MS deciding that autoplay by default for all external drives was a good idea?
Not really software, but some really sophisticated and clever "programming" on mechanical computers like an old Mark 37 gun director or the old Soyuz astronavigators. F-15's CAS box or F-16A analog FBW setups are more modern examples.
The most sophisticated piece of software will always be written the next day.
Some Microsoft engineers who knew the internals of Windows are the most likely candidate authors. They may not be active at MS when they wrote it but they may have previously worked on it.
Obviously the OP hasn't read The Story of Mel
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
I'm not even kidding! :)
It's obviously Microsoft BOB. It was a very sophisticated piece of "work." Don't confuse sophisticated with good or anything like that, but I would maintain it was "sophisticated."
Nothing like it existed before.
Sophisticated? Not sure how to evaluate that, but 'elegant' seems to fit that 1984 ROM. Doing more with less was an Apple tradition begun with the Woz' original design and continued with Bill Atkinson & Andy Herzfeld's Mac ROM. Similar elegance would bring MS Office down to a 2MB size.
...omphaloskepsis often...
For me, that has been a FOR NEXT loop, a long time ago.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Obviously, TeX (or at least METAFONT) by Knuth.
Given how cumbersome it was, that must have been a very sophisticated implementation.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
If we are admiring clever malware then surely the most sophisticated are the ones even older than stuxnet that even been discovered yet. You know, the ones on the computers used by Trump/Putin/Assad/Netanyahu/Kim/Macron/Merkel/May/Trudeau/...........
Next question:
Who is the Most Disconnected, Computer-Illiterate CEO besides John Byrd?
It's a stupid question, but nowhere near as stupid as the treasure trove of confused, faux-intellectual questions with which Bennett Haselton has gifted us over the years.
Commonly mistaken for a planet, the Earth supercomputer has been working on finding the The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything for quite a while now, whose answer we know to be 42.
Unexpected, but I'd go for Excel - it is very, very damn good at what it does (and it does a lot).
What else could it be? Seriously...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Looking at the Merriam Webster definition of sophisticated, it mentions deprived of native simpliticy (emphasis mine). Highly complicated or developed, having refined knowledge. So my take on sophisticated with respect to software is that it's been worked over and improved a lot, and where possible, simplified (not the 'native' simplicity of Merriam-Webster's def). It also requires a lot of knowledge, including the kind of knowledge that only comes with experience, being savvy. Stuxnet was probably a team effort by some heavyweights with lots of experience focussed on a tough job, so yes, it would be very sophisticated.
Things like operating systems, compilers (C++ or PL/1 compilers), are very complex, and, with all the experience of writing new versions, they do get sophisticated, but I have the feeling that always, some of the work gets farmed out to newer, inexperienced hands, who only have to do work that is 'good enough'.
Casting around in my mind for something that might compare to stuxnet in sophistication, I thought of postgres. It's open source, so experts can study the code freely, and, as I understand it, it is competitive in a very hot market, so it has to be kept tight. Many hands work on it, but if somebody is sloppy, somebody else will notice. I'm not qualified to judge it myself, but is there anybody out there who is and who would like to weigh in with an opinion?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Come on guys! It's a good candidate but no one knows. There is no one in the world who has even begun to look at all the sophisticated software out there. And whatever level of sophistication we credit Stuxnet with having, it will be eclipsed by something else if it hasn't been already. A better question to ask is....
Probably hiding in the dark corner of a CPU somewhere.
Is high level code really software anyway? It's never executed in the CPU. It's just instructions to a compiler / interpreter on how to make the actual software.
Hohohohoho see the CLASSIC proof of that here soyboys as you DRINK the golden wine https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... straight from MY tap (of GOLDEN piss), all natural ingredients, naturally filtered (of ME pissing right into your shitbag mouths & funniest part is, you help me DO it - you LIKE it, lol!).
Do you LIKE the taste? Obviously yes - just like folks like my hosts engine, anything I put out, even piss, is GOOD (unlike "your kind").
Above all else though? Hey - MOMMY LOVES YOU!
APK
P.S.=> Hahahahaha (I think this is the BEST overall letting you SHEMALE soyboys destroy yourselves for GOLD (ask SuckerBERG about that - he's the expert as is all his kind are - heading into ZylonB & Furnace time again judging by what's happening - the PRICE of it is that, always, they don't learn)... apk
EMACS 4 LYFE.
Fuck Ajit Pai
Seen a few spreadsheets that grow to levels of "sophisticated" you can barely believe fit in a spreadsheet.
The most impressive thing I've ever seen are the SpaceX reusable boosters landing within inches of where the software instructed them to land.
The most sophisticated software I've ever seen or heard of is VAX VMS. It was 64 bit before 64 bit was cool, had a scheduler that could run rings around windoze10, exhibited zero memory leaks, and could and did run for years without a shutdown. I was systems manager for a system that was a laboratory server, serving over 100 people and reading experiment results from dozens of machines (mass spectrometers, gas chromatographs, etc.). It handled two departmental printers (remember those?) with automatic fail over print queues. I had to bring it down one Saturday to install a new tape drive (remember those?), then I ran autogen (I know you don't remember that) to automatically tune VMS using a whole raft of system parameters. Let it run normally, then a month later rebooted it and ran autogen again, per the VMS documentation. And then I just let it run.
It ran for two solid years and a couple of months until I had to shut it down again to install another disk drive (remember SCSI?). Over those years it ran countless processes (millions), ran countless print jobs, served data to more than a hundred workstations running who knows what software, ran automatic backups every night, and never ever had a single complaint (it found a few bad sectors on one disk drive, but moved that data and mapped those sectors as bad, never loosing a single bit of data). I'm just sayin' that it ran absolutely flawlessly.
That, my friends, was sophisticated software. And it's locked in an HP basement somewhere when it should have been fully opened sourced decades ago so that all could learn from DEC's amazing example. Dave Cutler was, is, a software god. Even if he did, after Ken Olsen stumbled and ended up killing DEC, move to Microsoft and give us windows NT. And even if he hated UNIX. Because even gods aren't perfect. ;-)
Stuxnet was (is?) sophisticated but the article made me remember something I wrote back around 1981 or 1982 that, although not very sophisticated, was tiny, fast, and very destructive. I was in charge of a project that needed to make direct use of aspects of the IBM PC hardware that were not documented and we did a lot of experimentation and found a few fatal flaws that cost the company in ways that were unanticipated. It turns out that the original green monochrome graphics card, as easy on the eyes that it was and ubiquitous at the time, had to have a bit written out on an I/O port immediately on power up or the horizontal sync would lock causing the big horizontal output transistor in the monitor to saturate and become a dead short to ground from the power bus. The BIOS took care of that on power-up but it was possible to flip it off later. The monitor would screech for a few seconds and then die and smoke would come out of the case and sometimes catch fire if you didn't turn off the power in time. (That monitor did not have a power switch, it relied on the power switch on the PC.) Also, it turns out that the original floppy drives did not have stops at the end of the head moving screws and you could step the heads until they literally fell off with a loud "clunk" sound as the heads fell out of the drives. Just for fun, I wrote a short bootloader in assembly code that fit in the boot sector on a floppy that, in a couple of seconds after turning on the PC, would smoke your monitor, destroy all of your floppy drives, load a horrible noise into the shift register going to the speaker and set it free-running, turn off all interrupts and halt the CPU. There was nothing else on the floppy except for that one boot sector. An expensive and time consuming repair needed in less than 3 seconds after you turned on your computer and if you didn't get to the big red power switch quickly flames might start coming out of the monitor and the case start to melt! Although we documented the code and used it in house as something to watch out for, only one deadly floppy was made and we kept it under glass on the wall. I'll have to look and see if I still have a printout of the code stored away in a box somewhere.
IMHO, if it's any spacecraft or probe it's Voyager not Apollo. Apollo had humans on board who could take over and manually control things if they had to. They did that on Apollo 13. Here's an interesting read about the Voyagers
They have to patch that stuff with light-hours of delay, and no humans on board. It's been running for decades. That's certainly some of the most *robust* code, if not the most sophisticated.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
An insanely complex system of self-replicating nanobots to form a grandiose consciousness known as the Collective who's sole purpose is to achieve perfection through the destruction of entire species by converting them to be part of the Collective. The Borg are insidiously adaptive to all forms of warfare and impervious to nearly all forms of weaponry ever created. Like bed bugs, miss killing just one of them and you'll end up having to fight them all over again.
1, Engelbart's Demo - All of the wonders of GUI well before everyone else.
2. Lisp / Forth / APL - Pick your favorite
3. OS/9 on the Radio Shack CoCo, it supported multiple users, and the hardware didn't even have a real UART for serial communication.
4. VAX/VMS
5. Any of the "4k Demo Scene" type programs.... it's amazing what they pack into 4k, or 1k, or whatever.
It's "Finnegans Wake" by programmer James Joyce. The software is so sophisticated that most people misinterpret it as a stream-of-consciousness novel, but actually it's a program that draws fractal math versions of images of a guy named Finnegan, waking up from a nap... hence the name.
As I understand it, the compiler needed to take the source code and convert it into executable code on the first platform to be able to run it has still not yet been completed... in fact, as far as I know, it hasn't even been begun. THAT'S how sophisticated THAT piece of software is.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Murdering people is fun in video games because murdering people is fun in real life:
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-love-war/
Meaningless question.
There are enterprise software suites that are sweeping in their ambition. Numerous examples exist where a single application is designed to run most/all of your business. No, I don't mean something like Microsoft Office either.
SAP, Oracle Applications, Cerner, Epic, Salesforce, and vast numbers of industry-specific vertical applications.
These applications are rarely elegant and don't inspire a lot of love. They necessarily make business processes a bit generic. They are always modular (in my experience), both as a way of trimming the function set to what the customer needs, reducing costs, and managing the complexity of internal interfaces.
However for the overall number of business functions and function points they have to accomplish? Hard to beat.
Funny how game engines aren't part of that list.
Perhaps the Haiku virus would be a distant second. Written in Assembler at the same time script kiddies and their 1.xMB Word macro viruses were gaining traction AND broadband was gaining steam from the world of 56k modems, Haiku weighed in at 20kb, but in that tiny package carried a full-text database, a Haiku-generating engine, a scanning engine to look for email addresses from a specified set of file types, a mini-email server and a mini http server.
Every time you ran it, it collected email addresses, emailed itself to your contacts and uploaded the collected email addresses.
And it wrote some decent Haiku.
Press Statement by First Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs of DPRK
Pyongyang, May 16 (KCNA) -- Kim Kye Gwan, first vice-minister of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK, made public the following press statement on Wednesday:
Kim Jong Un, chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, made a strategic decision to put an end to the unpleasant history of the DPRK-U.S. relations and met Pompeo, U.S. secretary of state, for two times during his visit to our country and took very important and broad-minded steps for peace and stability in the Korean peninsula and the world.
In response to the noble intention of Chairman Kim Jong Un, President Trump stated his position for terminating the historically deep-rooted hostility and improving the relations between the DPRK and the U.S.
I appreciated the position positively with an expectation that upcoming DPRK-U.S. summit would be a big step forward for catalyzing détente on the Korean peninsula and building a great future.
But now prior to the DPRK-U.S. summit, unbridled remarks provoking the other side of dialogue are recklessly made in the U.S. and I am totally disappointed as these constitute extremely unjust behavior.
High-ranking officials of the White House and the Department of State including Bolton, White House national security adviser, are letting loose the assertions of so-called Libya mode of nuclear abandonment, "complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization", "total decommissioning of nuclear weapons, missiles, biochemical weapons". etc, while talking about formula of "abandoning nuclear weapons first, compensating afterwards".
This is not an expression of intention to address the issue through dialogue. It is essentially a manifestation of awfully sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq which had been collapsed due to yielding the whole of their countries to big powers.
I cannot suppress indignation at such moves of the U.S., and harbor doubt about the U.S. sincerity for improved DPRK-U.S. relations through sound dialogue and negotiations.
World knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fate.
It is absolutely absurd to dare compare the DPRK, a nuclear weapon state, to Libya which had been at the initial stage of nuclear development.
We shed light on the quality of Bolton already in the past, and we do not hide our feeling of repugnance towards him.
If the Trump administration fails to recall the lessons learned from the past when the DPRK-U.S. talks had to undergo twists and setbacks owing to the likes of Bolton and turns its ear to the advice of quasi-"patriots" who insist on Libya mode and the like, prospects of upcoming DPRK-U.S. summit and overall DPRK-U.S. relations will be crystal clear.
We have already stated our intention for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and made clear on several occasions that precondition for denuclearization is to put an end to anti-DPRK hostile policy and nuclear threats and blackmail of the United States.
But now, the U.S. is miscalculating the magnanimity and broad-minded initiatives of the DPRK as signs of weakness and trying to embellish and advertise as if these are the product of its sanctions and pressure.
The U.S. is trumpeting as if it would offer economic compensation and benefit in case we abandon nuke. But we have never had any expectation of U.S. support in carrying out our economic construction and will not at all make such a deal in future, either.
It is a ridiculous comedy to see that the Trump administration, claiming to take a different road from the previous administrations, still clings to the outdated policy on the DPRK - a policy pursued by previous administrations at the time when the DPRK was at the stage of nuclear development.
If President Trump follows in the footsteps of his predecessors, he will be recorded as more tragic and unsuccessful president than his predecessors, far
W.O.P.R.'s OS was the most sophisticated.
There are many elegant bits of code that that have come out of necessity (say to fit in the OS or Kernel in the last 500 bytes of a ROM), than there are 'sophisticated' projects or ibraries of code that come out by today's standards.That said, few people here could tell you the most sophisticated pieces of code ever, because we don't have security clearance for the projects that happen behind the closed doors of the NSA, Google etc...
The kernel patching protection in Windows 8 would have stopped struxnet. Don't say they don't learn from their mistakes.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It all hinges on how someone defines "Sophisticated".
You could mean snobby blingware stuff. Or extremely well written programming that just doesn't fail. Something that is super user friendly and easy to use. Perhaps it skillfully employs new techniques or is just a more efficient use of techniques that others tend to fail at.
As to Stuxnet, in the field of sabotaging an enemy, it qualifies. In the field of malware, it's just moderately successful. For software in general, not really.
VHDL guys: input would be appreciated ...
I've always been impressed by the ability of microprocessors to do things like out-of-order and speculative execution, branch prediction, register renaming and floating point math. I'm guessing that modern microprocessors like Intel Xeon, Phi or IBM Z-series are designed using some variant of HDL which could be considered a programming language, so that program might be considered sophisticated. The fact that it generates a piece of hardware is irrelevant -- that's the output. The sophistication measurement is for the HDL.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I wrote the most sophisticated piece of software ever written. It took two months to write. When I tried to compile it, the compiler couldn't handle it. It was that sophisticated. All the other examples of software have been understood by compilers or some other type of machine to run it. I tried building it on Macs, Windows, and Linux computers. I even tired mobile devices, my calculator, and recorded it onto a VHS tape to see what a VCR would do with it. Nothing worked. My software couldn't be understood by any existing piece of hardware. Here it is, the most sophisticated piece of software ever written, without whitespace: main() {+c+:}
No one knew it existed because it didn't do anything on 99% of systems. And knowing 3 or 4 zero-day flaws is not the same as being "sophisticated".
Stuxnet is certainly impressive as far as ultra-targeted viruses / worms go (though I remember viruses from the 90s that could morph their own code to escape detection; they didn't rely on no one noticing them), but from neural networks to global-illumination renderers to video compression codecs, there are loads of software far more sophisticated than Stuxnet.
Given the scale of what they implement (speech recognition, understanding of context, etc.), I'd vote for Alexa or Siri.
The most complex single pieces of code are of course web browsers. Those have grown so large that only a few corporations can just barely manage their development. However that's not really sophistication, given saner standards to implement, you could do exactly the same with a tiny fraction of code.
It's easy to just pile code on top of code, what's hard is to find sensible abstractions you can use to make the code simpler and easier to maintain.
Have you ever seen just how complicated the Linux tcp/ip stack is? There are TONS of things that are more sophisticated, complicated, elegant, or difficult to create.
I'd propose a few possibilities I don't see mentioned much: modern game engines Frostbite or perhaps Unreal4, deep learning AI systems which can drive cars and play poker, and Linux/Windows kernels.
I'd like to suggest that the most sophisticated deployment would be in the finance sector. Considering that the very earliest applications of computers technology aside from military sector, is the banking/finance sector.
Second thing I'd like to point out is that on a single machine application the complexity and sophistication is limited to a single machine to a cluster serving an application. SAP systems are still pretty large and sophisticated deployments.
However it was the banking and finance sector that first introduced the concept of a message bus with hundreds of different applications for thousands of servers and clients all talking and interacting with each other, all loosely coupled into various exchanges across the world all the way out to the individual buying their groceries.
It's so ubiquitous we don't even think about it, yet I'd suggest we'd be hard pressed finding a more sophisticated example.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I would say the AEGIS system.
You don't need much code to write a TCP/IP implementation that will meet all standard use cases.
That doesn't mean it isn't sophisticated. Having a huge volume of code has little to do with the cleverness of the solution. Since TCP/IP is what enabled the internet I'd argue it's definitely sophisticated and worth considering. Probably not my choice to top the list either but still awfully clever.
. I'd argue cruise missile software is 2 to the Shuttle control systems (there were actually two, the primary by IBM and the backup by Rockwell). Otherwise your list is quite good!
Thanks though it wasn't intended to be a ranked list since I have no specific definition of sophisticated to rank by. I just enumerated them as I thought of them.
I'm actually serious about this.
Think of the very first program you over wrote. It was likely something like "Hello World!". And, it excited the fuck out of you. You programmed the 'puter to do that. YOU??!???!! And that started your career in nerdery.
A one line program did all that for you and millions of others. That's some pretty sophisticated stuff right there.
IIRC, Israel jumped the gun with a beta version the US didn't want to release, but Israel fucked over US and released anyway, leading to Stuxnet eventually getting discovered. That pissed off Obama and the US elite hacking team and likely stopped further hacking cooperation in the later years.
The most complicated program I ever used was for machine control of a camera on an arm. You could program it in either 1 Cartesian coordinates 2. Polar coordinates 3 machine steps And it would automatically translate these faster than I could press the button to go. Useful and elegant.
I'd vote for the TRUCK FUMP worm, or whatever it's called. This thing's made to find and widely distribute every electronic record of trump's info, financial data, etc. I'm hearing that it's extremely sophisticated, removing itself entirely after it's done it's work. I'm certainly not alone in hoping that as the results become more widely distributed that trove of goodness finds a newspaper, and hopefully /. as well. :)
This world would surely be a much better place when it's finished.