Software bug facts for kids

A software bug is like a tiny mistake or glitch in the code that makes a computer program work wrong. These mistakes can be annoying, making your computer crash or freeze. Almost all computer programs have some bugs. If a program has many bugs, or a few very serious ones, we call it buggy.

Most bugs happen because of mistakes made by the developer who wrote the program. But sometimes, they can be caused by problems with the tools used to build the program. When people find bugs, they often tell the developers so they can fix them.

Sometimes, people say their computer has a bug when something is wrong with it. Often, this is actually a computer virus that has gotten onto their computer. A virus can make the computer slow or do strange things.

Some bugs are not a big deal. For example, in many video games, characters might accidentally walk through walls. Other bugs can be very serious. Imagine a bug in a navigation system that causes an airplane to go the wrong way!

What Are Different Kinds of Bugs?

Buffer Overflow

A buffer overflow happens when a program tries to write or read information in a part of the computer's memory it shouldn't touch. Think of it like trying to put too many books on a shelf, and they spill over into another area.

Arithmetic Overflow

An arithmetic overflow occurs when a number in a program gets too big for its storage space. It's like a counter that can only go up to 99, and if you try to add one more, it resets back to zero. This can cause unexpected results.

Infinite Loop

An infinite loop is when a program gets stuck repeating the same set of instructions over and over. There's no way for it to stop! This often makes the program freeze and stop responding.

Roundoff Errors

Sometimes, numbers in a program aren't perfectly accurate. This happens when a special type of number, called a floating point number, doesn't have enough space to be exact. This can cause problems, like a navigation app sending you to the wrong place or sound in a music app sounding weird.

Division by Zero

You know in math that you can't divide a number by zero. If a program tries to do this with whole numbers, it will usually crash. On computers running Linux, you might see a message like "floating point exception," even if floating point numbers weren't involved.

Clipping Problems

In video games, clipping problems are also called collision detection problems. This is when an object, like your character, passes right through something solid, like a wall or floor, that it should hit. It's a very common bug in many games. Sometimes, players even use these bugs to save time in speedruns, like jumping through a ceiling to skip a long path.

Security Bugs

Security bugs are very serious because they can let someone sneaky get into your computer. They might also make your computer crash on purpose, which is called a denial-of-Service attack. Fixing security bugs is super important because they could allow intruders to steal private information, like credit card numbers or passwords. Famous examples include Heartbleed and Shellshock.

What is a Misbug?

A misbug is a bug that people start using as a helpful feature! For example, a bug in an Android phone might accidentally let users get special "root access" to their phone, which gives them more control.

Hardware Bugs

Some bugs aren't in the software code but in the actual physical parts of a computer, called hardware. For instance, an old type of Pentium processor had a bug where a specific instruction would make it stop working until you restarted the computer. Since hardware bugs are physical design flaws, you can't just fix them with a software update. However, sometimes a software update can find a way to work around or hide the bug.

Images for kids

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  Error resulting from a software bug displayed on two screens at La Croix de Berny station in France.

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  The typical bug history (GNU Classpath project data). A new bug submitted by the user is unconfirmed. Once it has been reproduced by a developer, it is a confirmed bug. The confirmed bugs are later fixed. Bugs belonging to other categories (unreproducible, will not be fixed, etc.) are usually in the minority

See also

In Spanish: Error de software para niños