Where do programs come from? This question has eluded experts since the birth of computer science as a rigorous disclipine. This article provides a brief survey of the literature on what is often called the origin problem.

A number of software research conferences such as ICSE, ISSTA, PLDI, POPL, OOPSLA, SOSP, and USENIX Security incorporate an artifact evaluation (AE) process: authors of (conditionally) accepted papers can optionally submit their tools, code, data, and scripts for independent validation of the claims in their paper by an artifact evaluation committee (AEC). Papers with accepted artifacts get stamped with one or more badges. Personally, I’m a big fan of the AE process, as it promotes reproducible and reusable research.

But what makes a good artifact? Although there exist many great resources for writing good papers, as well as for writing good rebuttals, I haven’t found anything similar for submitting artifacts for evaluation. This is my attempt at filling the gap.

Are you ready to test your skills as a human fuzzer? Here’s a collection of puzzles where the objective is to find an input that leads to the execution of what appears to be dead code.

Or did it always exist? Just like the primordial loop, we may never know if and when there was a beginning.