Two related concepts that came to mind are fuzz testing and dither. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing http

Two related concepts that came to mind are fuzz testing and dither. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither The discovery of the usefulness of dithering is interesting too: "One of the earliest [applications] of dither came in World War II. Airplane bombers used mechanical computers to perform navigation and bomb trajectory calculations. Curiously, these computers (boxes filled with hundreds of gears and cogs) performed more accurately when flying on board the aircraft, and less well on ground. Engineers realized that the vibration from the aircraft reduced the error from sticky moving parts. Instead of moving in short jerks, they moved more continuously. Small vibrating motors were built into the computers, and their vibration was called dither..."