MIT's Crash Cart for Frozen Software Lets You Escape the 'Infinite Loop'
Beware the Infinite Loop Also known as the "pinwheel of death." mary hodder via Flickr MIT engineers have a reputation for applying their vast intellectual resources and physical energies toward solving some of mankind's greatest challenges. And it's fair to say this morning that at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, researchers have lived up to that expectation. They haven't built the first true AI, nor have they created perpetual motion or demonstrated a working fusion reactor. But they have figured out how to unfreeze a stalled word processing program so you can save your work, so surely those other things can't be far behind. In all seriousness, the problem of "infinite loops" is beyond annoying. It saps productivity from software (and those using it). Infinite loops occur when a program gets stuck executing a single block of code over and over again (you probably know this as "freezing" or "f*&k!")....