Adversarial Testing, was Thou shalt have no 1628

It is easy to prove that you can get free energy from nothing, if you are not careful how you draw a box around "the system under consideration." Most of the perpetual motion machines can be dismissed out of hand by a few simple conservation ideas, starting with energy, momentum and then thinking about entropy and enthalpy. Usually the perpetutual motion machines that actually work do so because energy flows somehow across the "boundry" that is the machine. Usually it is because the machine is a scam: the wires connecting it to the power grid are well-hidden, the battery is disguised, the big AC magnetic field from the next room is not noticed, etc. I've been posting some ideas in another newsgroup that involve energy balances in a complex system (this planet) where some of the "experts" don't understand thermo at all. Arghh ... too much babble.

In any case, I just meant that when one talks about gaming the system, it is important to understand the larger boundary that includes ALL the inputs to that system. In the case of coding and testing that includes peers, bosses, potential future bosses and peers, etc. Lots of interesting issues in both game theory and in managment theory from the various posts.

The shorter version of the above was my comment way up or down thread about using honeypots to gather free testing. The reward to the tester (cracker) is "street cred", and the reward to the system software designer is free testing. So it seems to me a honeypot scenario (where it is possible to do such a thing) is a win-win.

Perhaps there is a very long discussion we have not quite had yet that revolves around the coder tester (white hat vs. black hat) culture and how to tune that culture itself to create the best possible software.

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... Hank