Comment on They Need To Stop Doing This

bleistift2@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  “The other programmers keep accidentally writing code that ends up in an infinite loop. I’d like you to make a program that can reliably detect that.”

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  • elvith@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You may joke, but if I had a penny for every time someone asked me to solve a problem, that basically boils down to the halting problem, I’d be rich.

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    • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah, accidentally running into the halting problem is common in automatic code analysis.

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      • PoolloverNathan@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It’d be nice if we wrote something to detect it running into the halting problem.

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    • drcobaltjedi@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I was recently tasked with the traveling salesman problem on a project. My first pass was quick but produced sloppy inefficient results. Well boss didn’t like it so he had me go back at it again so it would be far more accurate. Well now it slogs through figuring out an optimal solution of several thousand points.

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    • randon31415@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I have always wondered why the answer to the halting problem isn’t: “If no output has been returned in X time, BREAK, restart program from beginning.”

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      • niartenyaw@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        what if it needed just one more second to complete?

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      • Shalaska@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Because that will fail to detect a program that halts in X+1 time. The problem isn’t to detect if a program that halts halts, the problem is to generally create an algorithm that will guarantee that the analyzed program will always halt given an infinite time running on an infinite computer.

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  • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Just check the git blame.

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  • jeff@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    A full solution to the halting problem can’t exist. But you can definitely write a program that will “reliably” detect them to a certain percentage.

    And many applications do exactly that. Firefox asked me today if I wanted to stop a tab because it was processing for too long.

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    • bleistift2@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That’s not even close to solving the halting problem. FF doesn’t check if the program has been in its current state before. It literally just checks if 10 seconds have passed without JS emptying its event loop.

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      • jeff@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Right. There is no solution to the halting problem, that’s been proven. But you just showed you can very easily create a way of practically solving it. Just waiting for 10 seconds does it. That will catch every infinite loop while also having some false positives. And that will be fine in most applications.

        My point is that even if a solution to the halting problem is impossible, there is often a very possible solution that will get you close enough for a real world scenario. And there are definitely more sophisticated methods of catching non-halting programs with fewer false positives.

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      • cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        My loop isn’t infinite, just longer than the heat death of the universe.

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    • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      For JavaScript apps, stopping them when they consume too much resources is definitely a good idea. But if you work on some project where it’s common to run computionally intensive tasks, it can be harder to detect non-halting.

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  • float@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Just because it’s not possible on a Turing Machine doesn’t mean it’s impossible on a PC with finite memory. You just have to track all the memory that is available to the algorithm and once you detect a state you’ve seen already, you know it’s not halting ever. The detection algorithm will need an insane amount of memory though.

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  • CurlyChopz@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Easy.

    If( loop == inf) {

    End;

    }

    Pay check please?

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    • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Here you go:

      Zero dollar bill

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      • CurlyChopz@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Woah! This is worthless!

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  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There have been genuine efforts to do that. Obviously (well, for a very niche use of “obviously”) it’s not always possible, but detecting infinite loops isn’t like the uncertainty principle.

    It’s called The Terminator.

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• notabot@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This. Very few problems are truly impossible to solve, they arem in fact, just wildly impractical to solve. So don’t try to tell the PM/client/coworker-with-a-‘brilliant’-idea it can’t be done, tell them what it’ll take to work out what it’ll take to do it. Either they go away, or you end up in charge of a project with an astronomical budget and no clearly defined deliverables.

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• randon31415@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I mean, now a days, I can upload the image into stable diffusion automatic1111 and click interrogate CLIP and then see if it outputs “bird” as a reverse promopt, but this comic WAS from 4 and a half years ago, so the programmer was right on the time-frame.

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  • float@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It always depends o which existing tools you have access too. Go back some more years and there is no GPS. Detecting the bird will be the easier problem then.

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• AccidentalLemming@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Funny thing is, since that comic was originally published bird detection has gotten a lot easier

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  • Ultraviolet@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    About 5 years after, and there was a research team behind it.

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    • Brainsploosh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Several teams actually

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  • Setarkus@toast.ooo ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I bet it’s because the camera now also scans for the 5G radio waves that are used to control the “birds” instead of just recording waves in the visible spectrum

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• darcy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  respect for uploading the image, linking the page, and crediting the author :)

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• Pistcow@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  What is a bird!?

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  • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    a miserable little pile of secrets

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    • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      *cue Diogenes, bursting into Dracula’s throne room while holding a chicken*

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      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Plato bursts into Dracula’s throne room holding a lantern and a mirror

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    • Pistcow@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Throws water bowl

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  • unreachable@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    insert “bird isn’t real” meme

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