Researchers Discover 57-Year-Old Bug in Apollo Guidance Computer Using AI and Specification Language
By
henrygarner
Slow-proofed and worth the wait. Worth its weight in flour.
Summary
Researchers discovered a previously unknown bug in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) code that had been missed for 57 years despite extensive scrutiny. The bug is a resource lock in the gyro control code that leaks on an error path, silently disabling the guidance platform's ability to realign. The discovery was made using Claude AI and Allium, an open-source behavioral specification language, which helped distill 130,000 lines of AGC assembly code into 12,500 lines of specifications to identify the flaw.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledWe found a bug in it that had been missed for fifty-seven years: a resource lock in the gyro control code that leaks on an error path, silently disabling the guidance platform's ability to realign.
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) is one of the most scrutinised codebases in history. Thousands of developers have read it. Academics have published papers on its reliability.
We used Claude and Allium, our open-source behavioural specification language, to distil 130,000 lines of AGC assembly into 12,500 lines of specs.
How a specification found what fifty-seven years of scrutiny missed.
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