eli5 Can technology encounter errors at random?

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Like are glitches and errors always causes by something? Or can it be possible they are random?

In: Technology

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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