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I've had great success (in software) with randomized/probability based testing. You don't walk the full state space but generate subsets randomly to walk.

If done naively, it doesn't work because you are unlikely to hit the problematic bug. So you have to be clever: do not generate inputs uniformly! Generate those inputs which are really really nasty all the time. If you find a problem, then gradually simplify the case until you have reduced the complexity to something which can be understood.

With some experience for where former bugs tend to live, I've been able to remove lots of bugs from my software in edge cases via this method. (See "QuickCheck").




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