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Comment by nkassis | Hacker News Reader

with proper TDD (tests representing the environment) it should be possible to generate random commits and only commit them when they pass the test suite.

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What do you do when there are serious ethical considerations with running your test suite?

Run it in a Virtual Universe with the ethernet cable unplugged.

I would say it should make us realize we are no more than mere simulations in some huge computer about to have the power cable pulled by god's boss before he tells him to get back to work. (scifi book idea )

I'm pretty sure that was the plot of a fairly well know scifi book cough hhgttg cough. Except it wasn't God's boss that pulls the cable - Earth was demolished to make way for an intergalactic bypass.

That's kind of a stretch of an interpretation, don't you think? I always thought that the Earth was still physical in the way that we usually think of it, and humans were just part of its physical operation rather than being simulations.

Yeah, us being the substrate rather than the software is a bit of an unusual take on it, even now.

This raises the possibility of us finding out that happiness/nirvana is NP-complete, leading to the mass suicide of the entire human race. That would suck.

Procedurally generated programming?

Given how that works out for the world we live in, there really would be more bugs than anything else....

http://www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/nmnh/buginfo/bugnos.htm

Because a passing test suite is proof of correctness, right?

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