alt Hacker NewsIt’s funny, when I’ve seen this demonstrated, it’s basically literally impossible to get the right result because the test maker doesn’t define an instruction set that you can rely on. They will deliberately screw up whatever instructions you give them no matter how detailed. A computer has a defined ISA that is specified in terms of behavior. A compiler transforms a language with higher level abstractions into this low-level language. I’ve never seen this “test” done with any similar affordance, which doesn’t really teach anything.
Oh I think this lesson teaches quite a lot. Maybe your instructor is deliberately screwing up, but perhaps other end users are just not paying attention, or are missing assumed knowledge, or are feeling particularly adversarial on the day they need to follow your instructions.
One of many lessons that can be taken away from this exercise is to understand your audience and challenge the assumptions you make about their prior knowledge, culture, kind of peanut butter, et deters.