I was lurking in your recent thread about a knowledge recovery engine,
finding it rather interesting. Then, I ran across a little tidbit in March
2006 issue of Scientific American magazine. If you squint, it seems somewhat
related to your idea. Thought you might it interesting, perhaps something to
read more about, if there's info on the web somewhere.

The text of the sidebar, on page 26 of the magazine:

Debugging is notoriously difficult, and researchers are devising new ways to
test the complex code used by the military. One such method comes from Ted
L.Bennett and Paul W. Wennberg of Triakis Corporation in Redmond,
Washington, which makes simulators and provides software validation
services. Writing the Journal of Defense Software Engineering last year,
they described a research project sponsored by NASA in which they showed how
simulations designed to verify system designs can also be used to probe
software for faults. Their method allows users to check software for code
that is not being utilized. "It either shouldn't be there,", Bennett says,
"or it should be tested."

Meanwhile a multiyear research project at the Carnegie Mellon Software
Engineering Institute focuses on "function extraction", a means of
describing software functionality to determine exactly what it should do and
a way to counteract "back doors" or other undesirable software
modifications.

that one isn't even remotely a new idea.. one of the FMS products (Paratrak,
I think, but I get them all confused w/o running them) has been doing that
since the early PdoxDOS days..


--
Steven Green - Waldorf Maryland USA

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"Steven Green" <greens (AT) diamondsg (DOT) com> wrote

Is it OK if I still find it interesting? :-)

"Doug Kanter" <ancientangler (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote in message
absolutely.. the ability to intelligently document somebody else's apps has
always been interesting..


--
Steven Green - Waldorf Maryland USA

Diamond Software Group
http://www.diamondsg.com/main.htm
Paradox Support & Sales - Corel CTech Paradox

Diamond Sports Gems
http://www.diamondsg.com/gemsmain.htm
Sports Memorabilia and Trading Cards

"Steven Green" <greens (AT) diamondsg (DOT) com> wrote

Hell.....the ability to document one's OWN apps is interesting.

Doug Kanter wrote:
The so-called process of "refactoring" (or any other buzzword) ... of
parsing information from entire applications and putting it into a metabase
for analysis, is a fascinating one. Even what we did at Viasoft with COBOL
was pretty interesting -- although the movers-and-thinkers at that shop
could not think of any unit of storage larger than a byte and that proved
to be their technological downfall.

Now if it turns out that some twist of this idea _is patentable ...

----
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