A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. It is often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, and in circuit bending, as well as among players of video games, although it is applied to all types of systems including human organizations and nature.
The term derives from the German glitschig, meaning 'slippery', possibly entering English through the Yiddish term glitsh.
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An electronics glitch is an undesired transition that occurs before the signal settles to its intended value. In other words, glitch is an electrical pulse of short duration that is usually the result of a fault or design error, particularly in a digital circuit. For example, many electronic components such as flip-flops are triggered by a pulse that must not be shorter than a specified minimum duration, otherwise the component may malfunction. A pulse shorter than the specified minimum is 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. A glitch can occur in the presence of race condition in a poorly designed digital logic circuit.
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 a euphemism by comparison to 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. While the fault is usually attributed to the computer hardware, this is often not the case since hardware failures rarely go undetected. Situations which are frequently called computer glitches are:
Such glitches could produce problems such as:
Examples of computer glitches causing disruption include an unexpected shutdown of a water filtration plant in New Canaan, 2010;[1] failures in the Computer Aided Dispatch system used by the police in Austin, resulting in unresponded 911 calls;[2] and an unexpected bit flip causing the Cassini spacecraft to enter "safe mode" in November 2010.[3]
In video games, a glitch is a programming error which results in behavior not intended by the programmers. Glitches may include incorrectly displayed graphics, collision detection errors, game freezes/crashes, sound issues, and others. Some glitches are potentially dangerous to the game save data.[4]
"Glitching" is the practice of a player exploiting faults in a video game's programming to achieve tasks normally impossible if the game's script runs as intended, such as running through walls or defying the game's laws of gravity. It is often used to gain an unfair advantage over other players in multiplayer video games.
During quality assurance (such as the role of a game tester for video games), glitches must be located, a report compiled, and then fed back to the programmers.[4] (An example of this is getting to fight MissingNo. from Pokemon Red and Blue.)
Canadian Oxford lists it as a 20th century word of unknown origin. Some reference books, including Random House's American Slang, claim it 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. So new, in fact, that on July 23, 1965, Time Magazine felt it necessary to define it in an article: "Glitches—a spaceman's word for irritating disturbances." Glitch is also said to be an acronym standing for Gremlins Living In The Computer Hardware.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitching.net