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Every day, no exceptions

#114 3 images

Dale ruled the shop must always be ten pounds under the rival, and Russ automated it. The rival had the same rule, so both were giving sofas away by teatime.

The mistake

Two pricing scripts each poll the other's public price once a minute and write back that value minus ten pounds, so each run feeds the other a lower input. With no floor, no sanity check on the size of the change and no detection that the upstream price is itself derived from your own, the pair forms a closed feedback loop that ratchets down ten pounds a minute until it hits zero and then goes negative. Because the writes go straight to the live storefront, the loop is also taking real orders the whole way down.

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