Re: software failure question

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <4ZmA6.1693$Ak1.181271@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net>, Phaedrus
says...
>
>I'm reminded of another famous software failure, that may or
>may not be an urban legend:
>According to the story, when programming a helicopter simulation
>for the Australian military, someone noticed that they didn't have
>any kangaroos.  Rather than write a whole bunch of new code to
>simulate them, they just derived a new subclass from the class that
>they used to simulate the ground troops.
>When they flew the new version of the simulation, the kangaroos
>scattered just as expected when the helicopter flew over the hill.
>But imagine their surprise when the 'roos came back and started
>firing at the chopper with surface-to-air missiles!

I did some investigation on that one when it first made the rounds a couple of
years ago. Apparently its mostly true, except that they also didn't have a model
for the SAMs, so it used the default model, which was multicolored beach-balls.
:-)

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