Determinism, Simics, and Flying Piggies

In a recent Simics seminar, I was asked about repeatability, variability, determinism and Simics. This is a question that comes up almost every time I present about Simics in front of an audience with testing experience. The people asking the question intuitively think that determinism is a bad thing – since it sounds like it will limit the execution scenarios that will be explored in testing. For a tester, variation is a good thing. However, determinism is not in conflict with variation. And I think I found a perfect illustration of this in a setting that is a bit more accessible and easy to understand than computer simulators. In a computer game, Bad Piggies, from Rovio.

Bad Piggies is a game based on a physics simulation (not particularly realistic, but still reasonably consistent with everyday experience), where you put together strange contraptions to guide an endearing little pig pilot from the starting point to a goal. What struck me about the game is its incredible sensitivity to inputs, while still being 100% deterministic. To me, this is absolutely analogous to how Simics works (and I guess drawing that analogy indicates a pretty warped mind too).

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