Illustration by Jacey
RICOCHET-T-T-T-T-T was published in Nature on November 20, 2019. What inspired this story? Find out on the Nature website! (Scroll to bottom of page.)
Excerpt
Writing RICOCHET-T-T-T-T
I know just enough about programming to be dangerous. This point was driven home one day when I inadvertently introduced an infinite recursive loop into my code. For those not familiar with a recursive loop, it occurs when a program calls itself, over and over, and loops endlessly. The only thing stopping it from running forever and using up the server’s memory are built-in recursion limits (no doubt designed with people like yours-truly in mind)…
(External links to Nature website. Story-behind-the-story at bottom of page.)
