"Some documents assembled, the engineers get to work trying to get a handle on how to organize a debottlenecking project. Unfortunately, the documents seem to be written partially in hieroglyphics, and are only partly complete. They make some very slow progress. The manager half-jokes that engineering schools should teach a course in engineering archaeology, where students are given a pile of 30-year old documents and asked to figure out what’s going on."
institutional memory and reverse smuggling
When I studied computer science, we did that. We were given 3 different versions of compiled, working code and told that only one version correctly implemented a particular algorithm and that we had to figure out which one was right and how the other two were wrong. It’s called “black-box testing”.
The algorithm in question was preferential voting. So the first task was to figure out how that worked in general before being able to poke at the different programs.
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benkraal posted this
