Rule Horror: I Use Double-Blind Experiments to Stay Alive

Rule One: Never look directly at the shadow in the corner of the street. Rule Two: You must sing at three in the morning. Anyone who gets a word wrong will be "erased." Rule Three: Do not count the steps on the stairs.

The whole world was memorizing rules, chanting spells, shutting their eyes, and kowtowing. Chen Gui alone was doing something else: he pulled out a sheet of graph paper and wrote, "Experiment One: Look directly at it and look away, three trials each. Control: Old Zhang. Variable: line of sight. Result: ..."

Three days later, he discovered that the rules had bugs. They were code, clauses, documents written carelessly by something immensely powerful and incredibly lazy. Clauses could conflict, conditions could overflow, and no one had checked the boundary values.

And what programmers excel at is finding undefined behavior (rules).

A year later, he put an ancient god on the dissection table. Paper title: "A Preliminary Study on the Relationship Between Eye Pressure and Migraines in Tentacled Creatures."