Ah Fu found a bug in his third month at ClearSea Navigation: a ship was routed on a 1,100-nautical-mile detour, burning $140,000 in extra fuel. No storm. No pirates. He filed a bug report.
His manager opened a backend panel Ah Fu had never seen. "If we hadn't taken that detour, five days later, that ship would have collided with a drifting unmanned container ship. 32 crew. 3-5 hours to sink."
ClearSea's "SeaChart" wasn't doing route planning. It was a causal intervention system called Reef Engine — finding dominoes about to fall and pressing on the one next to them, breaking the chain. Six years, over four hundred wreck interventions. But there's a paradox: interventions that work can never be statistically proven, because the prevented event never happened.
Why not publish the engine? Because then they'd have to answer: why didn't you save that other ship — the chemical tanker where 27 died, because an oil company refused to activate backup power?
"We didn't fail to save them. We weren't authorized to save them." Technical problems have technical solutions. Political problems don't.
Read the full bilingual story on the blog.
This article first appeared on my tech blog
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