Yeah, I wrote a model of Physics based on that idea and it found Space curved and pi in no time. SURELY we can characterize Life in such way, but maybe that particular statement.

I was nine when I made my first run of asterisks in a home made computer in school which I suspect had only two instructions, print and for loop. Then Apple was introduced and I went right away to make a programmatic animation, and to start writing the browser text flowing code; much of it went into paper, machine time was more important for games! :mad:

The software piece was completed and tested and sent to a foreign showcase. Then in the middle of the night, almost, a call that it is NOT working! And the client is the most important and expects the demo TOMORROW. It was a Java app. To make matters worse I have to debug in the *boss* s machine and it is... Linux. Some hours later I am going up and down the office from one machine to the NT one because vi... was showing file percentages, not line numbers. At one point clicking on one window... closed ALL modified file windows... so back again. I finally reached the point where results were here on the left hand and NOTHING, but NOTHING was reaching the right hand, just under my nose! Then I had this vague remembrance of *boss* going into my machine weeks before and, saying something about optimization, put hands to work in MY machine... He had erased something. The code was cold in my mind. Backups showed nothing. And finally, inspiration. This would not happen in C++, or maybe it would... the system was providing the function implictly and what boss had erased was the key, core, innermost, nine levels deep overriden function passing results from here to there and simplifying lots of other matters in the code. It was a simple assignment function. I was looking for the ghost of a function! There was no bug. It was an illusion. Everything was perfectly in calm but did not work. It was a ghost bug. Code was ready some eight hours later, both machines cleaned up as if nothing had happened, files emailed and I could half enjoy a half work s Monday and an uneasy sleep Monday s night... (To this date I wonder... did *boss* receive the files? Was the demo ready in time given time zones? Did the client buy? Did management understand the code was already tested and working and it was not a bug but rather... I have this strange feeling now...). :suss: djb/DJB :zzz: