> The federal body said work it was doing to revise and update information about where the historic quake struck had caused computer systems to misinterpret the data and think it was seeing a novel event.
It doesn't seem that implausible for a program to be reading through a dataset and issue a notice for a measurement above some value. If the dataset encoded years in just two digits, it (almost) makes sense that the program would report it 100 years off.
Imagine:
with open(file) as f:
for record in f:
year, month, day, time, magnitude = record.split()
if magnitude > 5:
raise_alarm()
It doesn't seem that implausible for a program to be reading through a dataset and issue a notice for a measurement above some value. If the dataset encoded years in just two digits, it (almost) makes sense that the program would report it 100 years off.
Imagine: