Like are glitches and errors always causes by something? Or can it be possible they are random?
In: Technology
If you un-wire the input of a logic gate, its input is undefined because cosmic background radiation has it being randomly between 1 and 0. if tuned and amplified to 50% probability, this would be the most “true” random signal generator.
Now think of high energy cosmic radiation hitting the input of a logic gate when it should be 0, but the energy dissipated along the signal bus forces it to be 1. That’s an error. The chance of this happening increases linearly with the amount of gates in a chip. E.g. a home computer has this happening once in a trillion times it moves data from A to B. A big-ass Server with petabytes of diskspace might have this happen a lot more often.
Since computers are electric signal processing machines this is a plausible cause for errors, simply EM-radiation.
For computers with HDD memory, vibrations can disturb the reading process of data by literally altering the relative position of the reader to the disk.
Do you think that’s possible? Even as unlikely as it is, can there possibly be an error in technology completely unrelated to physics, chemistry, or a explanation from human error?
Computers are not random; in fact, the entire system collapses once they become truly random. Instead we use various ways to come up with “Close enough to random” though psuedorandom number generators, and such.
As such, most errors have a cause, be it bad coding, memory corruption (which can be induced by radiation and cosmic rays) hardware damage, race conditions, or other things. While it may seem like a random failure to us, there’s almost always an underlying cause.
Depends on what you mean by randomly. Computers and electrical components are mechanical devices that experience wear. As use of a device increases so does the likelihood of error due to micro damages causes to the system.
Additionally they can be effected by outside events. Notable powerful events are lightning storms and solar storms.
Electronics, as with most things in life, are prone to errors and a great deal of effort goes into its creation to minimize these errors / maximize the consistentcy of the device
Random errors are possible from radio interference or something like that, but are extraordinarily rare. Programs and operating systems are extremely complex, so errors can appear random because you do not understand the triggering mechanism.
Most technology errors that are really random are human errors. One of the primary benefits of automating a process and taking humans out of it is that the errors are no longer random. Consistently patterned errors are easier to find, explain, compensate for, fix and cleanup afterwards than random errors.
Latest Answers