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The Bug That Made Gandhi Drop Nukes in Civilization Is Just a Myth

• uberman 6y ago
  There seems to be several sources that credit Meier as saying there was no bug here, but I am still a little puzzled by a couple of things. Recent debunking articles such as this one generally state that the "fake bug" was presented as an "integer overflow glitch", however both the original claim that there was a warmongering Gandhi and a description of the bug (if it existed) are of integer underflow errors. In either case (overflow or underflow), these types of errors were rather common enough to be more than plausible. I'm just confused by how the description of the bug got flipped, particularly as the original source for the claim of a nuclear Gandhi correctly describes it as: "This error caused -1 to underflow" The part that makes me question if the debunkers are actually telling the truth though is this claim: "As a matter of fact, a numeric bug of that nature comes from something called "unsigned characters," which aren't even a thing in the C programming language." This is clearly false and I would be surprised if Meier would have made such a claim.