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Exploitable bugs in the COBOL implementation would almost certainly be matters of national security, so I somehow doubt they'd open up the code! Joking aside,

by btown 5y ago

Exploitable bugs in the COBOL implementation would almost certainly be matters of national security, so I somehow doubt they'd open up the code! Joking aside, I think the commonality between collectible card video games and legal code is the notion of "code as data." The record that tracks, say, a Shadowverse or MTG card (not going to mention the other obvious example, especially not today), associates it with artwork, ensures that display logic and other-card-interaction logic is normalized with minimal duplicated data, allows it to be hotfixed, tracks its state through various QA stages, automates fuzz testing with many combinations of other cards... all that has analogies to what would be needed here. It's a rule engine where every field is a node in a directed graph (of course it's the tax code so it's not an acyclic graph, who are we kidding) but there are ways to analyze that. But, the same way a AAA game studio has ways to manage semi-trusted contractors (and, it would seem, even less trustworthy creative directors) and ensure quality at scale, one could imagine a crowdsourced system for rule verification. The "product" is less a tax form filling system and more of a distributed version control system and CI platform. You solve that, you solve a lot.

curryst 5y ago
To me, a significant part of the commonality is the preciseness of the text, and how much of an impact that can make. Many legal cases hinge on the exact phrasing of a law, and sometimes you don't realize the choice of a word is significant. Another part is that it's hard to program them in a sane way because the rules are arbitrary. It's possible to code how the rules are, but it's impossible to guess how they'll change in the future. Two things you assumed would never interact might need to interact in the future. Two things you thought would never stop interacting might suddenly stop. I'm not an accountant, but in the Magic world, you would assume that the turns go in a set order, right? Nope, there are cards that reverse the order of turns permanently. You would assume that a player always controls their own turn though. They don't though, there are cards to let you take someone else's turn. There are also cards that let you play the cards out of other peoples' hands. I looked at coding it, and it turned into spaghetti pretty quickly. Everything has to have ways to interact with everything else, and testing becomes incredibly difficult because of the sheer number of ways these things can interact. And it's hard to make even the most basic of assumptions because they're liable to change at any point. There are no "laws of physics" that at least define a set of possibilities.

by btown 5y ago

curryst 5y ago

To me, a significant part of the commonality is the preciseness of the text, and how much of an impact that can make. Many legal cases hinge on the exact phrasing of a law, and sometimes you don't realize the choice of a word is significant. Another part is that it's hard to program them in a sane way because the rules are arbitrary. It's possible to code how the rules are, but it's impossible to guess how they'll change in the future. Two things you assumed would never interact might need to interact in the future. Two things you thought would never stop interacting might suddenly stop. I'm not an accountant, but in the Magic world, you would assume that the turns go in a set order, right? Nope, there are cards that reverse the order of turns permanently. You would assume that a player always controls their own turn though. They don't though, there are cards to let you take someone else's turn. There are also cards that let you play the cards out of other peoples' hands. I looked at coding it, and it turned into spaghetti pretty quickly. Everything has to have ways to interact with everything else, and testing becomes incredibly difficult because of the sheer number of ways these things can interact. And it's hard to make even the most basic of assumptions because they're liable to change at any point. There are no "laws of physics" that at least define a set of possibilities.