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That is not satisfactory. Some instances of software are more crucial than others eg. software running money transfers must have less tolerance for bugs than a game I play on my phone. The question is not whether software works most of the time, but how badly things go wrong when mistakes happen.

Here's an analogy: A weather forecaster can predict "no hurricane" every single day and have a near-perfect success rate. Needless to say, that's next to useless. (False positives and false negatives have wildly different costs in this context.)



At a guess I'd say that the probability of a fault in a piece of software does approximately match the cost of it failing. A phone game is very likely to have more bugs than a banking system. My point is that both applications actually work really well. In my experience premium phones games crash maybe once in every thousand runs. Bank money transfer software crashes perhaps once in every few billion runs (that's a total guess but we'd hear about it if it was higher and there are a lot of bank transfers every day). I think that's quite good.




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