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

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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