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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?
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.
It has to support over a billion different conputers with different drivers and hardware plus support decades of backward compatbility. Android/Linux come close.
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.
why am i here?
Because God hates you.
It can do it all, from simple Tic Tac Toe to Global Thermonuclear War.
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.
My complaint about how Slashdot operates relies on the fact that, despite having a well established user base who are arguably more educated and science savvy than your average person, it doesn't take that as an opportunity to do a more in-depth article than the major news outlets can achieve. In the past, we have had many successful Ask Me Anything (AMA) style posts from notable figures in the tech industry. I'd like to see Slashdot expand on that. Any time a new study comes out or a new tech is getting hyped, I think the Slashdot editors should try and approach the original authors/researchers/developers and ask them if they'd be willing to participate in an AMA session. Instead of endless debating the points that appear in the necessarily condensed news articles, go straight to the horses mouth and get the facts that the news articles left out, get corrections or clarifications for what those news articles published.
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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.
I called it successful, not sophisticated.
In a discussion titled "What's the most sophisticated piece of software".
Every end has half a stick.