A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system, such as a transient fault that corrects itself, making it difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, in circuit bending, as well as among players of video games. More generally, all types of systems including human organizations and nature experience glitches.
A glitch, which is slight and often temporary, differs from a more serious bug which is a genuine functionality-breaking problem. Alex Pieschel, writing for Arcade Review, said: "“bug” is often cast as the weightier and more blameworthy pejorative, while “glitch” suggests something more mysterious and unknowable inflicted by surprise inputs or stuff outside the realm of code."
Etymology
Some reference books, including Random House's American Slang, claim that the term comes from the German word glitschen ("to slip") and the Yiddish word gletshn
("to slide or skid"). Either way, it is a relatively new term. It was
first widely defined for the American people by Bennett Cerf on the June
20, 1965 episode of What's My Line as "a kink... when anything goes wrong down there [Cape Kennedy], they say there's been a slight glitch." Astronaut John Glenn explained the term in his section of the book Into Orbit, writing that
Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was "glitch." Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical circuit which takes place when the circuit suddenly has a new load put on it. You have probably noticed a dimming of lights in your home when you turn a switch or start the dryer or the television set. Normally, these changes in voltage are protected by fuses. A glitch, however, is such a minute change in voltage that no fuse could protect against it.
John Daily further defined the word on the July 4, 1965, episode of
the same show, saying that it's a term used by the Air Force at Cape
Kennedy, in the process of launching rockets, "it means something's gone
wrong and you can't figure out what it is so you call it a 'glitch'."
Later, on July 23, 1965, Time Magazine
felt it necessary to define it in an article: "Glitches—a spaceman's
word for irritating disturbances." In relation to the reference by Time Magazine, the term has been believed to enter common usage during the American Space Race of the 1950s, where it was used to describe minor faults in the rocket hardware that were difficult to pinpoint.
Electronics glitch
An electronics glitch or logic hazard is a transition that occurs on a signal before the signal settles to its intended value, particularly in a digital circuit. Generally, this implies an electrical pulse of short duration, often due to a race condition between two signals derived from a common source but with different delays. In some cases, such as a well-timed synchronous circuit,
this could be a harmless and well-tolerated effect that occurs normally
in a design. In other contexts, a glitch can represent an undesirable
result of a fault or design error that can produce a malfunction. Some
electronic components, such as flip-flops,
are triggered by a pulse that must not be shorter than a specified
minimum duration in order to function correctly; a pulse shorter than
the specified minimum may be called a glitch. A related concept is the runt pulse, a pulse whose amplitude is smaller than the minimum level specified for correct operation, and a spike, a short pulse similar to a glitch but often caused by ringing or crosstalk.
Computer glitch
A computer glitch is the failure of a system, usually containing a computing device, to complete its functions or to perform them properly.
In public declarations, glitch is used to suggest a minor fault which will soon be rectified and is therefore used as a euphemism for a bug, which is a factual statement that a programming fault is to blame for a system failure.
It frequently refers to an error which is not detected at the
time it occurs but shows up later in data errors or incorrect human
decisions. Situations which are frequently called computer glitches are
incorrectly written software (software bugs), incorrect instructions given by the operator (operator errors,
and a failure to account for this possibility might also be considered a
software bug), undetected invalid input data (this might also be
considered a software bug), undetected communications errors, computer viruses, Trojan attacks and computer exploiting (sometimes called "hacking").
Such glitches could produce problems such as keyboard
malfunction, number key failures, screen abnormalities (turned left,
right or upside-down), random program malfunctions, and abnormal program
registering.
Examples of computer glitches causing disruption include an unexpected shutdown of a water filtration plant in New Canaan, 2010, failures in the Computer Aided Dispatch system used by the police in Austin, resulting in unresponded 911 calls, and an unexpected bit flip causing the Cassini spacecraft to enter "safe mode" in November 2010.
Glitches can also be costly: in 2015, a bank was unable to raise
interest rates for weeks resulting in losses of more than a million
dollars per day.
Video game glitches
The start-up screen of the Virtual Boy is affected by a visual glitch
Glitches/bugs are software errors that can cause drastic problems
within the code, and typically go unnoticed or unsolved during the
production of said software. These errors can be game caused or
otherwise exploited until a developer/development team repairs them with
patches. Complex software is rarely bug-free or otherwise free from
errors upon first release.
Texture/model glitches are a kind of bug or other error that
causes any specific model or texture to either become distorted or
otherwise to not look as intended by the developers. Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is notorious for texture glitches, as well as other errors that affect many of the company's popular titles. Many games that use ragdoll physics for their character models can have such glitches happen to them.
Physics glitches are errors in a game's physics engine that
causes a specific entity, be it a physics object or an NPC (Non-Player
Character), to be unintentionally moved to some degree. These kinds of
errors can be exploited, unlike many. The chance of a physics error
happening can either be entirely random or accidentally caused.
Sound glitches are in which there is an error with the game's
sound. These can range from sounds playing when not intended to play or
even not playing at all. Occasionally, a certain sound will loop or
otherwise the player will be given the option to continuously play the
sound when not intended. Often, games will play sounds incorrectly
due to corrupt data altering the values predefined in the code.
Examples include, but are not limited to, extremely high or low pitched
sounds, volume being mute or too high to understand, and also rarely
even playing in reverse order/playing reversed.
Glitches may include incorrectly displayed graphics, collision
detection errors, game freezes/crashes, sound errors, and other issues.
Graphical glitches are especially notorious in platforming games, where
malformed textures can directly affect gameplay (for example, by
displaying a ground texture where the code calls for an area that should
damage the character, or by not displaying a wall texture where there should be one, resulting in an invisible wall). Some glitches are potentially dangerous to the game's stored data.
"Glitching"
is the practice of players exploiting faults in a video game's
programming to achieve tasks that give them an unfair advantage in the
game, over NPC's or other players, such as running through walls or
defying the game's physics. Glitches can be deliberately induced in
certain home video game consoles by manipulating the game medium, such
as tilting a ROM cartridge to disconnect one or more connections along the edge connector and interrupt part of the flow of data between the cartridge and the console.
This can result in graphic, music, or gameplay errors. Doing this,
however, carries the risk of crashing the game or even causing permanent
damage to the game medium.
Heavy use of glitches are often used in performing a speedrun of a video game. One type of glitch often used for speedrunning is a stack overflow,
which is referred to as "overflowing." Another type of speedrunning
glitch, which is almost impossible to do by humans and is mostly made
use of in tool assisted speedruns, is arbitrary code execution which will cause an object in a game to do something outside of its intended function.
Part of the quality assurance process (as performed by game testers for video games)
is locating and reproducing glitches, and then compiling reports on the
glitches to be fed back to the programmers so that they can repair the
bugs. Certain games have a cloud-type system for updates to the software
that can be used to repair coding faults and other errors in the games.
Glitches can also be found in electronic toys. For example, in 2013, Hasbro released a game called Bop It Beats.
It was discovered by several players that the DJ Expert and Lights Only
modes have a bug that will give players a fail sound upon reaching a
pattern with six actions and completing them successfully. The more
difficult DJ modes can be completed in the Party mode as long as there
is a "Pass It" on the last few patterns. Hasbro was informed about this
glitch but as it was discovered after manufacture, they can no longer
update or upgrade existing units. Foreign versions of the game, however,
were shipped with this glitch already patched.
Glitches in games should not be confused with exploits.
Despite them both performing unintended actions, an exploit is not a
programming error, but instead an oversight by the developers. (Ex. Bunny hopping or Lag Exploits)
Television glitch
In
broadcasting, a corrupted signal may glitch in the form of jagged lines
on the screen, misplaced squares, static looking effects, freezing
problems, or inverted colors. The glitches may affect the video and/or
audio (usually audio dropout) or the transmission. These glitches may be
caused by a variety of issues, interference from portable electronics
or microwaves, damaged cables at the broadcasting center, or weather.
In popular culture
Multiple works of popular culture deal with glitches; those with the word "glitch" or derivations thereof are detailed in Glitch (disambiguation).
- The nonfiction book CB Bible (1976) includes glitch in its glossary of citizens band radio slang, defining it as "an indefinable technical defect in CB equipment", indicating the term was already then in use on citizens band.
- The short film The Glitch (2008), opening film and best science fiction finalist at Dragon Con Independent Film Festival 2008, deals with the disorientation of late-night TV viewer Harry Owen (Scott Charles Blamphin), who experiences 'heavy brain-splitting digital breakdowns.'
