Reflections on Trusting Trust - Computerphile

History of Unix stuff: Professor Brailsford discusses Ken Thompson's ACM Turing Award acceptance paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust"
noimssays...

I remember reading that paper in the early 00s and loving it. The bombshell for me was that at about 4:47 in the video he says he thinks Ken actually did do what I assumed the paper was joking about, which I'll admit sent a little shiver down my spine.

The only limit would have been Ken's forward thinking on how complex the self-updating aspect would be. Once it passes a certain threshold , iirc, it's essentially unstoppable. Below a certain threshold it would probably already have been found.

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