On 5/24/24 03:17, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

Rob wrote:

"Fuzzing" as it is now called (for no reason I can intuit)

Barton Miller describes coining the term.

As to where the inspiration of choice of word came from, I'll speculate : Bart Miller was a CS grad student contemporary of mine at Berkeley. Prof. Lotfi Zadeh was working on fuzzy logic, fuzzy sets, and "possibility theory". (Prof. William Kahan hated this work, and called it "wrong, and pernicious": cf. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0020025508000716.) So the term "fuzzy" was almost infamous in the department.

Prof. Richard Lipton was also at Berkeley at that time, and was working on program mutation testing, which fuzzes the program to determine the adequacy of test coverage, rather than fuzzing the test data.

Dan H.