{"id":9232,"date":"2019-06-26T07:22:10","date_gmt":"2019-06-26T11:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/?p=9232"},"modified":"2019-06-25T09:46:50","modified_gmt":"2019-06-25T13:46:50","slug":"micro-quorums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/2019\/06\/26\/micro-quorums\/","title":{"rendered":"Micro Quorums"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Listening to the Radiolab <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wnycstudios.org\/story\/bit-flip\">Bit Flip<\/a> episode. If you haven&#8217;t listened, then you really should first.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/AoSELdhL0N4?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Cosmic rays bombard the Earth. Electrical engineers are finding that these rays can trigger an electrode in a computer chip. The electrodes are bits. The cosmic rays changing a bit is a bit flip. Almost all the time these flips are benign. The wrong flip, though, can cause out of control behavior in automated systems.<\/p>\n<p>Think the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bestattorney.com\/auto-defects\/sudden-unintended-acceleration\/toyota-sudden-unintended-acceleration.html\">Toyota sudden unexpected acceleration<\/a> or the <a href=\"https:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/news\/boeing-says-engine-issues-key-083510424.html\">Boeing 737-MAX&#8217;s autopilot dropping the plane a thousand feet<\/a>. As electrical engineers discover these behaviors, they are building in redundancies. Instead of depending on a single sensor, there will be multiple and the computer\u00c2\u00a0will act on the majority, aka a quorum.<\/p>\n<p>The episode didn&#8217;t say this, but it reminded me of the Boeing 737-MAX issue where the planes had a single pitch sensor light unless a buyer opted for the multi-sensor package with a light saying the two sensors disagreed. Given what is known about bit flips, I would think it would be typical airplane safety to have these redundancies built into an autopilot.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I don&#8217;t expect microprocessor quorums everywhere. There will be too many sensors to affordably do this everywhere. But, I do expect them in systems designed to preserve human life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listening to the Radiolab Bit Flip episode. If you haven&#8217;t listened, then you really should first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3100,999],"tags":[3478,3477,3473,3472,3027,3474,3475,3476,3482,3481,3480,3479],"class_list":["post-9232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-automation","category-build-engineering","tag-bit-flip","tag-bits","tag-boeing-737-max","tag-computer-chips","tag-computers","tag-cosmic-rays","tag-electrical-engineers","tag-electrodes","tag-majority","tag-quorum","tag-redundancies","tag-toyota"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1rUBW-2oU","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}