A Software Engineer’s Perspective

Published May 30, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey guys,

You are my favorite Westworld podcast, though I love everything that Joanna Robinson does.

I’m a software engineer, and I work on avionics (airplane computers).

This last episode had me kicking myself for not thinking about it sooner.

We run hundreds of tests on all of our software, and doing it all by hand would be inefficient and fraught with human error. So we build simulations and test frameworks that do everything over and over in the exact same way and handle documentation and everything for us.

I could get into a lot more about unit testing vs system testing and everything, but I won’t bore you with the details.

Basically, Ford and William could have been doing the same thing, Ford with BernArnold, William with Delos. It took William decades to get to 149 iterations, in a simulated environment Ford could achieve the same test set exponentially faster, perhaps months, the real limit would be Ford’s development time.

There’s some other really cool implications that have to do with machine learning and training sets that the Cradle introduces, but that might be better left to a computer scientist.

This is far too long already, in summation love the pod and simulation/testing is important and very cool.

Thanks,
Drew S – From Kansas City

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