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heisenbug /hi:'zen-buhg/ n.
[from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment significantly enough that buggy code, such as that which relies on the values of uninitialized memory, behaves quite differently.) Antonym of [Bohr bug]; see also [mandelbug], [schroedinbug]. In C, nine out of ten heisenbugs result from uninitialized auto variables, [fandango on core] phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the malloc [arena]) or errors that [smash the stack].
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