
Collection of Software Bugs - scottlocklin
https://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/bugse.html
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0xffff2
Can anyone explain how the bridge collapse in Miami was a software bug?

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Enginerrrd
I'm going to go ahead and commit to saying it wasn't. I believe they are
misinterpreting the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board. It
sounds like, among other errors, they used inappropriate load parameters in
the modeling software they were using. That's not the software's fault.

The reality is that despite the fact that we have decent software tools for
structural design and analysis, they depend heavily on intelligent
initialization of inputs from a human. While naively, that may sound like a
software failing to non-civil/structural engineers, it would, IMO, be a nearly
unsolvable problem to create software that can do it all for you.

For example, in this case, I believe one of the several failings that led to
the collapse was related to inadequate structural analysis of construction
staging. So the loading on the failed nodal connection was much greater during
one phase of partial construction, and most of the analysis occured on the
final, fully constructed design. (Though even in that state there were design
failings.)

You can have a perfect model, but if you fail to actually use it correctly to
assess for all the scenarios it won't help you.

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NoInputSignal
Is there some traceability on what input parameters were used in testing
computer models?

Is there a hypothetical world where the modeling software failed to show this
scenario for the correct input parameters?

Either way, I agree, based on the links presented in the OP, there is no
evidence presented of it being a software bug.

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aiCeivi9
I have randomly selected 3 links and 2 were dead. Using some king of
webarchive might be a good idea for sites like this one.

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azhenley
Definitely incorporating this into my software engineering course. Thanks for
this!

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champagnepapi
I'd sure hate to be the guy who lost $460M lol "Knight Capital Group realized
a $460 million loss in 45-minutes."

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jandrese
Eh, that kind of money is more or less pocket change to a Capital Group.

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mreome
For some of the biggest capital groups maybe, but that loss actually destroyed
Knight Capital Group:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group#2012_st...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group#2012_stock_trading_disruption)

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jandrese
Which means they were something of a penny-ante company by the standards of
the street.

