Memoretics
I’ve been trying to put memory dump analysis on relevant scientific grounds for some time and now this branch of science needs its own name. After considering different alternative names I finally chose the word Memoretics. Here is the brief definition:
Computer Memoretics studies computer memory snapshots and their evolution in time.
Obviously this domain of research has many links with application and system debugging. However its scope is wider than debugging because it doesn’t necessarily study memory snapshots from systems and applications experiencing faulty behaviour.
Initially I was thinking about Memogenics word but its suffix is heavily associated with genes metaphor which I’m currently trying to avoid although I personally re-discovered software genes approach to software disorders when thinking about Memoretics vs. Memogenics. Later I found some research efforts going on but seems they are based on constructing software genes artificially. On the contrary I would try to discover genes in computer memories first.
Also Memoretics has longer prefix almost resembling Memory word. This had the final influence on my decision.
PS. I was also thinking about Memorology word but it has negative connotations with Astrology or Numerology and was coined already by someone like Memology and Memorics.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
February 4th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
I like the idea. How about an alternate definition
“Memoretics is the study of computer memory contents or a subset of this, usually to diagnose a fault in expected code behaviour”
February 5th, 2008 at 11:18 am
If we consider the “usually” part we get memory dumps when customers observed faulty behaviour. We just need to understand what was the type of the fault or see deviations from expected properties. I would correct it a bit as
“Memoretics is the study of computer memory contents or a subset of this, usually to diagnose the fault type and deviations from expected code behaviour”
This is the “usual” or “practical” side. However we shouldn’t limit ourselves to faulty behaviour as debugging does and consider what we can get from studying expected code behaviour like reverse engineering does. Anyway we are still in the process of figuring out the domain of Memoretics. We just need to be sure that is not broad enough
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