I’ve been running one for a while and love it. Have also built a Nix -> OpenWRT config language transpiler so that I can keep my router state in Nix files and have nice deterministic rollbacks etc. It’s been great!
Author here. That’s right — the challenge was representing a tree in an existing SQL database that we’d chosen for its pricing model. I think encoding a B-tree in SQL would be a lot less fun even than what we did.
Thanks,our company is in the DC area so I just reached out with an offer to chat. Wesnoth is an incredible project, I can't believe he doesn't have a programming job.
If you run your Hegel tests in Antithesis, you get this for free (along with various sorts of “non-local” assertions, perfect reproducibility even for concurrent or distributed code, etc.).
But yeah, not hard to hack together basic coverage guidance outside Antithesis. That works well for large classes of programs, just not a majority of them.
If I had been wearing my fiendish CEO hat at the time, I might have even said something like: "somebody pointing this out will be a great way to jumpstart discussion in the comments."
One of the evilest tricks in marketing to developers is to ensure your post contains one small inaccuracy so somebody gets nerdsniped... not that I have ever done that.
Glad you enjoyed the talk! Making Bombadil able to take advantage of the intelligence in the Antithesis platform is definitely a goal, but we wanted to get a great open source tool into peoples’ hands ASAP first.
Antithesis | Distributed Systems Breaker Extraordinaire | Full-time | SF or London or DC
---
Have you always wanted to channel your inner Kyle Kingsbury? We are looking to hire somebody with a deep understanding of distributed systems who can bring open source or customer software under test in our platform and find fun issues in it.
Preferred locations: SF, London, DC. Remote is a possibility for this role if you're really good (though be aware that we're a very in-person company culturally speaking, so it might be annoying for you).
To apply: email 'will' at our company domain with a description of something interesting that you've worked on.
I am one of the people who was on the panel. As always, it's a very lossy process when a journalist is summarizing another journalist summarizing a 90 minute discussion. Happy to expand in the comments here on any of the issues that got brought up.
It’s not quite a fair comparison, since an RL agent is trying to learn a policy that wins fair and square, while a fuzzer is able to take back moves. But if you’re working in a domain (like anything that can be simulated) where “time travel” is possible, you’d have to be crazy not to use it!
The longer you run it, the cleaner the run gets. But Metroid is a very compute-intensive game to fuzz, and we were already nearing the limits of what BigQuery could do for us with that run.
Yes, this is a really fun idea and something that we want to do. Though these days we’re setting our sights higher than Nintendo…
A funny story though: a regular conference gimmick we have is “Man vs. Machine” where we have attendees race our fuzzer to the end of Mario level 1-1. We did this at the final year of Strange Loop, and the fuzzer was winning handily until not one, not two, but three different professional speedrunners walked by and destroyed us.