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Admin
"Random and repeatable" is not contradictory based on the classical definition of random. Only WTF is developer smugness.
Admin
TRWTF is on shoulders of whoever was taking the requirements from the customer. Clearly here, the customer meant "random" in the sense he'd use it in the problem's domain - "not pre-planned", "not logical", or "emergent" - not in the software domain. Arguing over semantics is not the customer's job or burden, it's the job of the person transcribing the requirements to make sure the requirements match the customer's expectation. TRWTF is expecting a non-engineer customer to be an expert in requirements analysis.
Admin
Same here, seems simple to allow the user to have control over the seed providing both repeatability as well as the potential for new ones. Or perhaps better, don't explicitly show the seed but allow each variation to be stored and reused if desired.
Small world, I think I know someone who worked/s on the software at the receiving side of the data stream.
Admin
Admin
The real problem is that in any large organization, and the Navy is one of the largest, there's going to be a lot of fingers in the pie, all the way from the bottommost project planner, up to the Admiral that eventually signs off on the project. Subtle issues like the degree of randomness don't survive the trip from the Admiral's brain down to the poor sod that actually wrote the spec.
A really experienced team of implementors would have gone to spend a day with the Admiral and go over each sentence of the plan and confirm that's exactly what they wanted. Then they should have allocated another two iterations to get it right when the Admiral changed his mind or requested a change.
Admin
Forget about tanks. Rickshaws are where the danger lies.
What's up with this site? Sometimes it takes up to 2 minutes to load a page.
Admin
I want to stab each and every one of you.
Admin
["Unexpected" and "military" are two words that usually don't go together. In the military, every plan has contingencies and every contingency has plans, and each of the plans have contingencies all their own, ad infinitum.] - Daily WTF
[No battle plan survives contact with the enemy] - Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
I'm going to have to side with the German on this one.
Admin
to the person who linked to Snopes, stop doing that! Snopes makes me angrier than just about any other site on the internets. no citations!!! How can you debunk urban legends and not say what your sources are? Snopes trains people to believe assertions just because someone said so. No better than the emails that my mother-in-law forwards. /Rant
Admin
Translating what the client says to what they want is the hardest thing to do. I remember once, way back, a cute series of cartoons representing the various interpretations from developers, management, client, etc. of a swing set. The one where maintenance had to cut a chunk out of the tree was spot on! I still chuckle about that. Still reading? Good! 22cf80a42ae12cad211127c37dd7fc80
Admin
look out, a real nazi! not like the grammar ones that normally lurk around these parts
Admin
Go read something about Clausewitz, too. He wrote about "friction", that plans always are changed the moment they are put into action.
Admin
why not make a random event and store the settings in a log for them to reproduce later?
Admin
Holy f%$#ing ass crackers Batman! A real Nazi? I guess anything relating to Germany considers that person a Nazi... I'm 1/64 German... OMIGOD you know what that means!?!
Admin
That's true, but as the GP pointed out, this is also a problem with the specification.
It boils down to just another scope-creep WTF, with "entropy" thrown in for good measure.
Good to know one country's waters are protected by contractors who don't know WTF they're talking about. It's a vain hope that it's not one of ours.
Admin
Herman didn't bother with boring stuff like rote date memorization or even basic use of reference materials in school. He therefore is unaware that von Moltke died over 30 years before Nazism was conceived. Try this one if you prefer American imperialism (AKA "saving Europe's ass"):
[A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.] - George S. Patton
Admin
I CANNOT BELIEVE that nobody yet has complained about the terrible misspelling in "Randomizaion"
Not only is it spelled properly in other places, but it is misspelled improperly twice, once during speech, and I know that whoever that was in real life didn't pronounce it that way.
Admin
You build a word pool.
You fill it full of military-sounding words: prefixes - "Operation", "Taskforce", "Combat Mission", "Scenario", some adjectives - "Bold", "Enduring", "Unstoppable", "Vigilant" and some nouns - "Force", "Tiger", "Freedom", "Eagle", "Storm".
For each mission, you use the random seed bits to pick and combine words from the list, so that each run-through has a name like "Taksforce: Striking Eagle" or "Mission Unstoppable Storm". That way they get an easy-to-remember name for each simulated situation. Or they can pick and choose names from your list to get a random-but-repeatable mission with a name they like the sound of.
Result: Military brass cream their pants, customer satisifaction levels sky-high, mucho repeat business. Sure, it's a McGuffin, but hey, that's what makes people happy.
Admin
Admin
Might I also add
[It's not the situation ... It's your reaction to the situation] -Robert Conklin
Admin
Blah, blah, blah. It was the first link in google that had the story I was looking for. And if you actually took the time to read it, there were references to whom and where it originated, so piss off. To satiate your rant, here's a link with the same story on a completely arbitrary website: http://baetzler.de/humor/killer_kangaroo.html Does that help? True or not, it's still an aumsing story
Admin
Admin
If it is a simulation of cyber attack they need to add RickRolling to the list of possible moves
Admin
The real problem here isn't a WTF so much as a very common anti-pattern in software development: the customer throws some specs over the wall, the developers implement them blindly and throw them back over the wall, and the customer don't like the results. The problem here is the wall, not the developers or the customer.
Proper software development requires many more feedback cycles than this - the wall should be a window, and an open one at that. This is especially true when there is exactly one customer for the product.
Back in the early to mid 90's, a certain hospital in the Boston area got award after award for their in-house Medical Information System - it did its job well, and its users/customers, from doctors to nurses to administrators, loved it. The primary reason cited over and over and over again for this success was that the developers and users were in constant communication. Not just at requirements-gathering time, but throughout the development and testing process.
The end result was that when software was released to the customers, they weren't seeing it for the first time and there were no surprises.
Such a degree of closeness isn't always possible, but had the developers and the Admirals (or at least the sailors) in this story been in more contact, the confusion over the meaning of "random" would have been caught and remedied much, much earlier.
Admin
I think I can solve the mystery, btw. It is not unreasonable to deduce that somebody who butchers the English language far enough to travesty the meaningful "alternative" as the completely misinformed and deeply confusing "alternate" is either American or just plain stupid. And anybody with an online name that's almost a perfect anagram of "Nostrils" clearly isn't stupid.
Besides, what exactly is wrong with being American? Outside the playground, is this some new "Yo' Momma" insult that I'm unaware of?
On the other hand, I'd purely love to find out what Americans use for "alternate" when they actually mean alternate...
Admin
We say "alternative", of course. I mean, what would be the alternate?
Admin
RE: if you roll the die at different times in the game, etc:
If I was tasked with producing "random" but repeatable scenarios like this, my first thought would be to have a "scenario set up description" that describes what all the units involved are, when and where each appears, what their objectives are -- take Hill #12? head forward in a straight line? seek out the enemy? etc -- how they respond when they meet the enemy -- from full scale attack to dig in and wait for reinforcements to immediately retreat to whatever -- and so on.
Then it would be a simple matter to make varied scenarios by creating multiple scenario set ups. In one the hostile force might be mostly interested in self preservation, in another they're attempting reconnaissance, in another they're very aggressive. Sometimes the main thrust is in the center; sometimes its on the flanks. Sometimes the armor leads the attacks; sometimes it's the air mobile; sometimes it's an infantry assault. Sometimes the initial force is small and disorganized to let you get overe-confidant when suddenly a million tanks come over the hill to counter-attack. Etc etc.
Then I'd give the admirals the scenario generator so they could invent new scenarios on their own. Or wait, better yet, charge them for each new scenario.
Admin
Yes, because anytime someone does something unexpected, it's always the same unexpected thing.
Officer: They're in standard formation following standard procedure... what the... THEY DID SOMETHING UNEXPECTED! HQ: Switch to response pattern UNXP! You DID practice that over and over, right?
And that's how the war was won.
Admin
Incorrect sir. When I worked with a similar system, we solved the "unexpected" by having the opposing forces managed by human instructors - completely capable of introducing whatever entropy or punishment appropriate.
Students failed to address the WMD capabilities? Enemy arty drops biochem in the middle of their largest mass of ground forces. Or had their un-refuelable A2A planes fly kamikaze missions.
The point is not to reproduce the same simulation each time, for each student, but for all students to be improved by the experience. Focussing on their weaknesses and intentionally limiting their successes if they particularly gifted with a particular strategy, but lousy at others.
Why the Admirals would want "tape recorded pseudo randomness" is beyond me.
Unless of course, this is a grading mechanism for a test - but running the exact same test for everyone seems... dumb.
Admin
I know exactly what means - you're multiplying! Ach nein, mein kopf tut weh! Oh no! It's taking hold of me...run...while you still can...ich bin ein...Berliner...
(CAPTCHA: I am well aware not all Germans are Nazis (and vice versa), and no offence was meant to any Germans (or Nazis) present)
Admin
The colloquialism, if you can believe your meats, is to pronounce alternate as "alternat" when meaning "alternative" as in "Let's watch the alternate ending for that movie". When referring to switching out something repeatedly it is pronounced "alternayt" as in "let's alternate who drives the kids in to school weekly".
Hope this helps.
I don't know ANYONE including my England born, English Aunt that was an English teacher that always uses 100% blessed Queens English.
I am sure I've committed errors in this post.
Admin
Hey, even Worms on the Amiga/PC had a "repeatable random scenario" thingy. It's not really a WTF to be able to replicate pseudo-random events. Online games depend on remotely synced RNGs, and demo playback in the games that support it also rely on the predictability and repeatability of the RNGs output.
Admin
This is a bit of a "me too" to others' comments, but: This story is really a classic example of the problems of requirements gathering. Just because the customer uses a word that you think you understand, doesn't mean that he means the same thing by it that you think. I've had many, many requirements gathering sessions where a little prodding made it quite clear that what the user really wanted wasn't at all what I would have thought if we'd stopped talking after his first sentence. As computer people, we get used to very precise language, because we are used to the idea that the computer does exactly what we say, whether that's what we really wanted or not. In other professions, people are used to much vaguer language. They'll call something a "number" that includes letters or special characters. They'll say "find the average" when they really mean "find the median". They'll make statements that sound precise and definitive without bothering to mention all the exceptions and special cases. Etc. And I can't count the number of times that a user has identified six possible cases that can arise, carefully explains what to do in five of them, and when I ask about the sixth says, "Oh, don't worry about that. That almost never happens." When I press to find out what we should do in the uncommon case, I've had a number of times that users have gotten visibly angry with me for wasting their time on this unlikely case. They seem to think that, as they could tell a human worker, "... and if some odd case comes up, just do something reasonable and consistent", that I should be able to tell the computer the same thing.
Admin
I bet the random seed was 42... for some odd reason.
Admin
I knew I was not going to like that answer.
Admin
Honestly this falls under "just another work day" at the end of it.
The original spec focuses on the big requirements, positioning of formations and all that stuff, and the client is all concerned about getting nice precise layouts.
Contractor does so, then client realizes after testing they need some deviations from the norm introduced. This could have been foreseen but it's easy to miss when you focus on everything "new" you need to do. Due to late hindsight spec change, the wording is too vague and client requests fix, contractor fixes easily.
Essentially the WTF boils down to the client using the word "random" in a general sense and the programmers hearing it in the technical sense. Amusing story but you have to get pretty pedantic to make TRWTFs out of it.
Admin
The Admirals requested "unexpected" and the solution was to add randomness? Somebody needs to shoot those developers (preferably with rickshaw-mounted-RPGs).
When clicked, the entropy button should have enlisted The Spanish Inquisition into the battle. Problem solved.
Admin
But Americans use the word both ways you describe. However, I believe that we almost always use the former pronounciation, rather than the latter.
Admin
Mmm. Okay - to combine the two subsets of comments that have been developing (Germans and spec errors), are you suggesting that this would not have happened in Berlin?
(runs away very quickly)
Captcha "facilisi" - yes, that was just too easy ..
Admin
I maintain that: (1) There is nothing wrong with being an American. (Weak predicate.) (2) There is nothing wrong with trying to become an American. Hell, since Thatcher and Howe butchered my country in 1981, I've been trying to do just that. Four times at the time of posting. I'll get there yet. I'm not British, I'm not English, I'm a Brummie; being an American is as close as I will ever get to feeling at home, this century. (3) There is nothing wrong with speaking, writing, or thinking -- re thinking, I'm just talking about the language here -- as an American; provided that one understands that one will occasionally commit what we Brits call a "solecism."
It makes no sense to re-use "alternate" when you actually mean "alternative."
"Alternative" actually means what it says. "Alternate" is a fucking stupid mistake, perpetuated (I assume, without looking it up) by dictionaries from Webster onward. Lord, even the saintly Johnson made mistakes. Which is why we have real dictionaries now, including etymologies.
Sorry, but I think you're still stuck in the Great Vowel Shift debate.
There is no alternate ending to that movie, unless you're watching (a) the director's cut (and I personally think that the Harrison Ford pissed-off voice-over is closer to Dick than that fabricated unicorn crap) (b) some piddling grainy black-and-white arthouse oeuvre without tits or (c) The Apocalypse.
Except that, of course, there is. "Hey! Let's alternative! We got the Ultimate Rip-Off DVD, which doesn't even mention "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and totally ignores either the theme or the cover artwork. But, heck, we can alternative. Here, sweetheart, you can put on the blue goggles and watch the unicorn, while I put on the red ear-muffs and listen to the voice-over.
"Whaddya say? I mean, we got no choice. It's an alternate."
Come to think of it, The Apocalypse isn't supposed to have an alternative ending. "We were happy ever after, and in fact the sky didn't fall in. Ooh, have you seen that nice Disney film about pterodactyls?"
No. Sorry. "Alternate" is "Alternate" and "Alternative" is "Quite Clearly Another Thing Altogether."
Admin
Can't we get some frikkin' lasers on these sharks? Why do I have to do all the thinking around here?
Admin
Admin
Absolutely. Job security for analysts.
Admin
Yep. Users in this case are coming up w/ something new. Actually seeing the product often gives them new ideas. The trick is: 1) is the idea actually good or is it creature feep? 2) If it doesn't affect the core app, push to "phase two" so the scope stays the same.
Admin
Powered by hamsters. Pulling rickshaws.
Admin
Admin
[In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.] - Dwight D. Eisenhower
Admin
Clever code monkey!
Admin
Spot on!
Admin
That's the new entropy button in action.