What is the most sophisticated piece of software/code ever written?

[Itsallaguess]

Interesting article -

What is the most sophisticated piece of software/code ever written?

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most- ... ohn-Byrd-2

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[UncleEbenezer]

Bit of a willy-waving title there. And begs a lot of questions, like what is a "piece of software" - bearing in mind that any complex system is built on a range of components from different sources.

Moon landings? Well, I find it a whole lot more technically impressive that ESA could rendezvous with and land on a comet. But in neither case is the software the most significant or impressive part of the technology.

[AleisterCrowley]

Well, I'm quite keen on the (literally) back of an envelope thing I did for our location based services launch (still in use x years later, now retired)
But I'm biased:-)

[AleisterCrowley]

If you want a genuine, serious answer, check out Margaret Hamilton (NASA)

[tea42]

The ten lines of assembler written by Mike Riddle the father of Computer Aided Design.

[Itsallaguess]

ಥ_ಥ

Itsallaguess

[Julian]

Bit of a willy-waving title there. And begs a lot of questions, like what is a "piece of software" - bearing in mind that any complex system is built on a range of components from different sources.

Moon landings? Well, I find it a whole lot more technically impressive that ESA could rendezvous with and land on a comet. But in neither case is the software the most significant or impressive part of the technology.

Interesting article and yes, it raises so many questions including ones about what "sophisticated" means in this context. Programmer-hours of coding? The impressiveness of the task it accomplishes? If impressiveness of the task then impressive to whom? People who are not computer experts are often amazed by things that are really quite simple to code but do not realise that seemingly simple things are totally beyond today's computer scientists and might well remain so for many decades.

It also raises the question of whether one should adjust for the era, i.e. what was the most sophisticated for its time. If not then the moon landings definitely don't get anywhere close to winning the prize. Don't get me wrong, they were an amazing achievement at the time, working with the crudest of tools (compilers, debuggers etc), the barest of resources (i.e. computing power available), and almost no prior art to build upon. Those people were amazing, Margaret Hamilton included, but it's definitely not a sophisticated piece of software in today's terms.

The "what is a piece of software" is indeed also a huge question. For me the most fundamental problem comes with neural nets and other learning technologies. You find a lot of that stuff at the cutting (and now not so cutting) edge of AI technology and research so something in that arena would probably be my pick if you forced me to play a game that I don't really think can be played (the original question is too vague and nuanced) but then for those deep learning systems how much of the end result could be considered the actual software and how much the weeks, months or years the software spent going through training?

So, with all that uncertainty then yes, I suppose it must be HYPTUSS

- Julian