What's the most impressive software you've ever seen?

For me, the Tierra system is the most impressive piece of software I have ever seen. Not that it's much to look at.

It's a virtual machine which gets seeded with viruses.  The viruses replicate imperfectly and are in competition with each other.
The result is that the viruses evolve within the virtual machine and different life-history strategies emerge.

The important point is that this is not a simulation of evolution, it is actual evolution within a different system. The initial population of viruses is hand-coded in assembly.  They require system memory to reproduce into and access to the instruction pointer to perform the replication.  After running for a while (a few hours or days) the population needs to be decompiled and analysed to see how the different forms replicate themselves and how they have evolved to compete for memory and processor time. Common strategies seem to emerge time after time:  co-operative living where individuals share the instruction pointer within a group; and parasitism where individuals steal the instruction pointer from others.

Tom Ray, the creator is not a computer scientist -- he was an ecologist.  He had the idea for the tierra system and talked to computer scientists about it.  They said it would never work. Tom then taught himself how to code and built the tierra system.

I read about Tierra in the early 1990's and it is the piece of software that has impressed me most. Not only because of what it does, but because Tom Ray refused to be told that was possible and taught himself how to do it.

What's the most impressive piece of software you have ever seen, and why?

Herbie

There are all here:
What's the Greatest Software Ever Written?

Most impressive I've seen is a CAD package called SolidWorks. I'd always been frustrated by 3d modelling programs like 3DS Max and Maya - they always seemed to think in terms of the datastructures used for 3d rendering: vertices, polys, etc. instead of how things are actually made in the real world. SolidWorks was the first piece of software I've used that worked *exactly* how I thought it should.

There are so many amazing software products out there that it is impossible to rank them.  Although I must say the two that have the greatest impact on my computing life are Matlab and Visual Studio!

Dr Herbie wrote:

What's the most impressive piece of software you have ever seen, and why?

rhm wrote:

Most impressive I've seen is a CAD package called SolidWorks. I'd always been frustrated by 3d modelling programs like 3DS Max and Maya - they always seemed to think in terms of the datastructures used for 3d rendering: vertices, polys, etc. instead of how things are actually made in the real world. SolidWorks was the first piece of software I've used that worked *exactly* how I thought it should.

Edit: dupe, sorry.

Right now, I'd have to say that Oblivion (Elder Scrolls IV) is probably the most impressive software I've ever seen.

I really can't stand all this troll/orc/dwarf/let's-make-a-potion-out-of-mushrooms crap, but the game itself, in spite of its repulsive points, is a work of art.

Booting the Whistler Beta that first time......

Mark Brown wrote:



rhm wrote: Most impressive I've seen is a CAD package called SolidWorks. I'd always been frustrated by 3d modelling programs like 3DS Max and Maya - they always seemed to think in terms of the datastructures used for 3d rendering: vertices, polys, etc. instead of how things are actually made in the real world. SolidWorks was the first piece of software I've used that worked *exactly* how I thought it should.

Interesting. I've always though very highly of the AutoDesk stuff. It really is amazing what you can build with that suite of products.

But I'm always interested in other vendors doing this stuff so I'll be sure to check out this SolidWorks.

Thanks for the tip

I can't come up with a single most impressive peice of software, but here are some off the top of my head:

* Photosynth (and Seadragon)
* PearPC (only PowerPC emulator actually able to boot OSX, impressive because not too long ago PowerPC emulators were thought to be impossible)
* OSX (a user friendly Unix?  Nooo... that's impossible...  unless you're Apple)
* Mozilla Firefox, around the 1.0 range (because they managed to decrapify the Communicator codebase and come up with something nimble and responsive.  Sad that they've moved into the same mindset that led to the main suite's downfall.)

Windows NT! Seriously, there's no comparison in terms of size and complexity.

Excluding operating systems, I'd have to go with Maya.

Singularity is pretty amazing

I'll slid in a software / hardware combo:

the Amiga 2000 !


soooo many things they did there way before PC or Mac had them...
and at prices that were amazing.


the PC world is just now getting to what the Amiga did...

sure we have faster cpu's and more ram but think of what the small Amiga team did:

Cooper and Blitter, FatAgnus, Paula and Daphine

true multitasking OS that ran in less than 512K of ram.

Video that supported NTSC output - at the time that was very expensive to do with a mac or a pc.

the PC Card that had a seperate cpu and ran DOS / WIndows and shared a HDD with the AMiga.

and the Mac option that ran MAC OS on the AMiga HW.

SecondLife: well its a bit buggy sometimes, but its pretty amazing how they can stream down an interactive, modifiable, persistent world to 50,000 users at once with such a high level of detail. Just keeping the world state in sync between everyone must be a monumental task.

SketchUp: I always used to like drawing objects on isometric paper. This program is intuitive in its ability to let you create 3D models with the same ease as drawing lines on a pices of paper. The axis inferencing stuff makes drawing 3D on a 2D surface easy, none of this subtracting/intersecting primitives to get the shape you want.

PhotoSynth has amazing potential, I'll wait to see how easy they make creating your own scenes and integrating with a huge online photo database.

Right now I'm pretty impressed with ArcGIS 9.x. It seems so logically designed to allow itself to be powerful and easily extensible for custom tasks while providing a base product that is fairly straightforward to learn. I'm impressed by the capabilities and the internal consistency of its object model.

I also still think the XBox 360 dashboard has a really impressive UI. Its so logically layed out, you always know where you are and you can get to any function with very few navigation steps.

The game SPORE looks like its going to be amazing. Whole worlds created from tiny variations in parameters of procedural creatures.
Tts release still seems to be a while off so it may not live up to the hype.

I can only speak about ths software I have used, and therefore I would have to say something like Mozilla Firefox 1.5.x.

I like a lot of software, but Mozilla Firefox 1.5.x is great, I like the design, and the bit which separates it from other software that I use is the easy customisation. I really like being able to add extensions (easily and freely) that will enable me to use the software more effectively, and Mozilla Firefox allows for this.

Angus Higgins

In my case, I think Google is the most impressive piece of software I've ever seen. Seriously, searching millions of webpages in a fraction of a second - it's commonplace now, but think about what goes into achieving that result... Awesome.

Aside from that the one which gave me the biggest thrill is actually Black and White... Ahh... Happy days.