Medium article on how lines of code kill. Written by Ashif Shereef
During the litigation of the Bookout accident, Michael Barr, an expert witness for the plaintiff, finally stumbled upon a convincing connection. His team of software experts spent 18 months with Toyota’s code, picking up where NASA had left off. This new team found what is called “spaghetti code,” a programmer lingo for software that has become a tangled mess. Code turns into spaghetti when it accumulates over many years, with features upon features piling upon them, resulting in a code- labyrinth which is impossible to follow, or test. Using the same Toyota model, the team demonstrated that there were almost 10 million ways for key tasks on the onboard computer system to fail, potentially leading to uncontrolled acceleration. A minor flip in a computer’s memory, such as a variable becoming a one instead of zero, could make the car go on a highway rampage.
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