Be aware of boundary conditions

Posted by Patrick Lam on Tuesday, April 14, 2020

This week’s observation is about boundary conditions. As programmers you have surely run into off-by-one errors. They’re hard to avoid! Somehow New Zealand systemically seems to fudge the issue, as you can see on this sign on Kapiti Island restricting access to the tower. Perhaps one can parse this as being “if you put eight plus one people on the tower it will fall down”, but that’s not consistent with the top display. (As an engineering exercise, you can also think about the safety factors built into the tower’s design).

What’s the most entertaining boundary condition you’ve encountered?

pat

Viewing tower at Kapiti Island.