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JAVA INTEGER OVERFLOW ERROR SERIES
The bug never actually existed according to series creator Sid Meier: his studio in fact anticipated the problem and coded aggression to never go below 1. Civilization: A longstanding Urban Legend of Zelda argued that Mahatma Gandhi, the in-game leader of the India civilization, had an AI aggression level of 1, but when a civ adopted democracy and thereby reduced its aggression two steps, it would cause the 8-bit variable to wrap back around to 255 and make him insanely aggressive.Compare Crosses the Line Twice when a situation is so horrible that, whether intentionally or not, it becomes hilarious. In older video games, a Kill Screen or Minus World is often a result of this, when trying to read data for level "257" causes a Reality-Breaking Paradox. This is a programming-specific relative of Readings Blew Up the Scale. While mostly obsolete because of technology improvements, these types of errors still remain famous because they were known to cause some pretty hilarious crashes or Ascended Glitches. Note that the limit does not strictly apply to 8-Bit systems and thus can be higher than 255, but occurrences of that sort are the most famous and most common due to the comparatively low cap. This can also work the other way around, which is called underflow - if a value attempts to decrease past 00000000, it will go "down" to 11111111, which can lead to some pretty strange variables. The problem is, there is no nearest 0 on the left, so the value rolls back to 00000000. Any commands to increase the value past this trigger the "next place value" protocol, which changes all 1s to 0s and turns the nearest 0 on the left into a 1. The problem is, it also got the short end of the stick in Powers of Two Minus One: since binary works by an "on and off" system, there was a maximum value - 11111111, equal to FF in hexadecimal or 255 in base 10.
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It was an effective, compact way to store data, which is why it was largely used until the mid-1990s. In older electronics, 8 bits was the standard - strings of 0 and 1 were divided into sections of eight each, and it was seen as sufficient to get every letter and number across. If androids someday DO dream of electric sheep, don't forget to declare sheepCount as a long int.
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