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2011 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

1. Introduction

verfasst von : Derek Partridge

Erschienen in: The Seductive Computer

Verlag: Springer London

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Abstract

IT systems are everywhere, and will continue to infiltrate the lives of all of us. We cannot easily check that an IT system is computing correctly. IT systems all fail: sometimes immediately and spectacularly, sometimes unobtrusively just once in a while, and sometimes in any combination of these two extremes. IT-system failures vary from production of blatantly incorrect results to failure to produce a desired result. The interplay of a variety of causes means that all large IT systems are unmanageably complex. IT-system complexity is discrete complexity rather than complexity based on continua. If, by chance (combined with exemplary practice and much effort), an IT system is constructed with no possibility of failure behaviour, we can never know this. The fundamental problem is the nature of the technology used.

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Nächstes Kapitel The Happy Hacker, Love at First Byte

This quote comes from The Day The Phones Stopped by Leonard Lee (Primus, NY, 1992). This book documents and presents in a non-technical account of many of the horror stories of computer systems going wrong.

A true story adapted from Lee’s book introduced in the previous note.

Computer Scientists, Antony Finkelstein and John Dowell provide a readable short outline in “A Comedy of Errors: the London Ambulance Service case study,” and recommend the full analysis of P. Mellor, “CAD: computer-aided disaster” in High Integrity Systems, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 101–156, 1994.

A short summary of the TAURUS debacle can be found at http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk (accessed 03/02/09).

One of the results in a Standish Group survey reported by Ted Lewis in the July 1998 issue of Computer magazine (p. 107).

From “The Economic Impacts of Inadequate Infrastructure for Software Testing”, US Department Commerce Planning Report 02–03, May 2002.

Quoted by Leonard Lee (see note 1, above) p. 203: it was General B. Randolph, former commander of the US Air Force Systems Command who said this in 1990.

Even our simple example is, in fact, a reality of IT-system failure in 2009. The multi-million pound IT system to manage the payrolls of all three armed forces in the UK has been “a familiar tale of growing costs and cock-ups. Barely anybody in the service seems to have received the right pay; and £29m in over payments have had to be recovered.” Reported in Private Eye, no. 1234, 17 April to 30 April, p. 28.

Donald Norman’s The Invisible Computer was published by the MIT Press in 1998.

The Arabic numerals, the digits themselves, also exhibit this ‘semi-analogue’ property: in the number system we use e.g. all number representations above “9” are bigger than all those below “9”, and all those greater than “99” are bigger than those below “99”, and so on. Our ‘place system’ for representing numeric values, the digital system par excellence, embodies a fundamental analogue characteristic under Norman’s view.

For most people, ‘discrete’ is a much less comfortable adjective than ‘digital’. It is, however, the correct general term. ‘Digital’ is just a special case of ‘discrete’ representation, and most components of computer programs are not digits, but other discrete objects such as characters, keywords and names. Curiously, modern computers are typically called digital computers because the electronic basis is discrete states, usually two distinct states that are most commonly represented with the digits 0 and 1. These distinct states could just as easily be represented by any pair of non-digit symbols, A and B, say, which would only be a little awkward when binary arithmetic is involved. The more accurate term ‘discrete computer’ jars, so we will stick with ‘digital’ when accurate and when it conforms to customary usage, but otherwise we will use ‘discrete.’

The Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) launched by President Reagan in March 1983, quickly dubbed Star Wars, required IT systems in roles that they could never, in practice fulfil. An illuminating critique of the SDI programme was given by David Parnas (an eminent Professor of Computer Science) to accompany his resignation from his consulting role in the project: D.L. Parnas, Software aspects of strategic defense systems, Comm. ACM Dec., vol. 28, no. 12, pp. 1326–1335, 1985.

These details are the subject of Chapter 9, pp. 214–240, of Lee’s book (see note 1).

The amazing functionality offered by the Internet and World Wide Web has generated a whole new breed of computer lovers, but these are very different from the lovers of computer programming; it is this latter, much smaller, group that I am focusing on, their thrills come from constructing programs not from ranging across the world whilst sitting comfortably at home. Interestingly, the growth of the Internet can be taken as an example of how large IT systems ought to be developed, see Aaron Sloman’s case for this in his article The iSoft Affair at www.cs.bham.ac.uk.

“Computer One,” a novel by Warwick Collins (Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd; new edition, 1997) is fiction, but the author’s premise, i.e., that the ongoing expansion of networked computers and systems over the next 40–50 years will result in final net-control of world energy sources and production, was persuasive to many. Using the platform of The Spectator (8 Oct. 1994) Collins presented his musings as a real and scary likelihood. My tongue-in-cheek deflation was also published in The Spectator (15 Oct. 1994, p. 27), and now we must wait just a couple more decades to see who was right.

The UK’s BBC television broadcast a Horizon programme on the 24 October 2006 that claimed (disingenuously, in my view) to explore the ‘what if’ scenario when computers will be as powerful as the human brain. It quoted an entrepreneur, Ray Kurzweil, who claimed that this equivalence, “the singularity”, will happen by about 2012 without questioning either his basis for this prediction or what ‘more powerful’ means in this context. After all computers are already much more powerful than human brains in terms of speed and accuracy of both calculation, and information storage and retrieval. My prediction, which I wrote to the producer, is that 2012 will arrive and “the singularity” will be as distant as ever just like the all previous predictions concerning Artificial Intelligence – not for nothing is this known as the science of hopeware. (but see R. Kurzweil, “The Singularity is Near”, Viking Press, 2005). In this case, we only need wait a couple of years.

Norman (see note 9) gives this quote as the surprising, but not-uncommon, response of the person who designed the system.

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontie by Katie Hafner and John Markoff (Simon and Schuster, 1991) tells the story of seemingly hereditary computer addiction in the USA – both father and son are smitten. The father happens to earn a living (working for the National Security Agency) fulfilling his personal preoccupation with computer systems, but the son (somewhat accidentally, it seems) messed up thousands of computers on November 2, 1989, with a small code-hacking experiment of his own. In another of their stories, the authors relate the tale of a computer fanatic who has been ordered by a California court to undergo treatment for his addiction to computer hacking.

Titel: Introduction
verfasst von: Derek Partridge
Verlag: Springer London
Buch: The Seductive Computer
Print ISBN: 978-1-84996-497-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-84996-498-2

Copyright-Jahr: 2011
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-498-2_1

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