I’m amused by the possibility of a compiler having a flag to set a random seed. (with a fixed default, of course). If you hit a compiler bug, you could try a d

I’m amused by the possibility of a compiler having a flag to set a random seed. (with a fixed default, of course). If you hit a compiler bug, you could try a different seed to see what happens. Or how about a code formatter with a random seed? Tool developers could run unit tests with a different seed until they find a bug - or hide the problem by finding a lucky seed for which you have no provable bugs :) Edit: Or how about this: we write a compiler as a nondeterministic algorithm where every output is correct, but they are optimized differently depending on an input vector of choices. Then use machine learning techniques to find the picks that produce the best output.