The above is a cropped screen shot of a Windows solitaire game I was playing Thursday (December 30, 2010) evening that shows a deck with two aces of spades. The game is running on a Dell laptop with Windows XP Professional, SP3 and all updates, and 2GB RAM. The solitaire game software is the original installed Microsoft game included with Windows XP.
On which ace do I put the two of hearts?
In over a decade of playing Windows Solitaire on various computers, I have never seen two of the same cards in a single game before.
I think it is such an odd curiosity, I just had to post it on my blog.
In some ways, it is frightening. We rely so much on government, business and personal computers these days to store our personal information, and do our computations. Imagine what could happen if one of those computers suddenly duplicated information from a file and stored it under another person's name or id number, or made occasional mathematical errors.
The systemic risk from our reliance and over reliance on computers is immense. Just like in the financial sector, where there is an element of trust that enables interactions to work smoothly, individuals, firms and governments trust the stored data and computations from computers. If that trust is weakened, economic and political activity will feel the negative effects of lost trust in our technological infrastructure. The prospect of lost trust in our technological foundation due to random errors is a huge systemic risk to commerce and we are unprepared to deal with it.
Addendum:
After a few more cards, there are five aces, two spades, one heart, one diamond and one club.
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