Beating Super Mario Bros: Deterministic Testing for Distributed Systems

​In this talk, we turn the original Super Mario Bros. into a stand-in for a complex distributed system to show why testing modern, stateful software is so brutally hard. Using Mario as a mental model, we illustrate how traditional end-to-end tests and unguided randomness fail to find real bugs, and how ideas from coverage-guided fuzzing, smarter progress metrics, and more realistic input distributions can systematically explore huge state spaces and uncover “unknown unknowns.”

The session culminates in beating Mario and then zooms out to show how Antithesis applies the same techniques to real distributed systems and production workloads. We also discuss the implications of AI Generated code, the verification gap it's creating, and how teams are using Antithesis to address it.

To make this a productive event, we encourage you to ask questions and share your day-to-day realities in your own engineering workflows to foster an open discussion.

​If you want to help teams ship faster with more confidence, especially as AI-generated code increases the volume and complexity of what needs to be tested, and take a more rigorous approach to finding, reproducing, and fixing the bugs conventional testing misses, we’d love to have you join us!

Agenda for the event:

6:00 - 6:30pm food, drinks and networking time.
6:30 - 7:30pm presentation + Q&A.
7:30 - 8:30pm virtual reality games!