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The "1990s Computing Power" comment is ignorantly harsh. The MAX (to the best of my knowledge) uses a similar AMD29050-based architecture as the 777 (where it w

The "1990s Computing Power" comment is ignorantly harsh. The MAX (to the best of my knowledge) uses a similar AMD29050-based architecture as the 777 (where it was pioneered) and the 737-800/900. It's amply fast and very very reliable, hardware and software (setting MCAS aside which is new to MAX). Any sane person would prefer the solid well-proven choice over the bleeding edge. People used to make similar comments about the AGC and the Space Shuttle GPCs e.g. that such-and-such-a-PC-was-faster. Yeah, so what?

londons_explore 8y ago
I'm not sure I agree here. There exist possibilities for far more safety with more compute. For example, when a mechanical failure occurs (for example an engine explodes and partially falls off) the flight characteristics of the plane change dramatically. Current systems fall back to human control, and hope that human will be able to figure out how to control a now very "unique" machine. Future systems could dynamically create new flight models based on collected data to be able to fly the machine in entirely new ways. For an example of this, did you know it's possible to fully control a quadcopter even with 3 out of 4 rotors broken and no working fins/flaps? [1]. That sort of 'fly it how it has never been done before' is out of reach of human control, and might save lives. [1]:. https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2013/12/new-algorithm-makes-quadrocopters-safer.html https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2013/12...
- exelius 8y ago
  This tech is just now making it into military aircraft in the F-35 (it’s designed to compensate for failures or combat damage while keeping the plane’s handling relatively consistent), so I would guess it’ll be a while before we see a civilian version.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    "Figure out a way to fly the thing in the new, crippled configuration" is hard. Figure out a way that's better than what the human pilot came up with may be even harder.
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      It's hard, but it's a very measurable problem. You randomly deform the airframe in a physics simulator, then get a real pilot to try to fly the simulated damaged airframe to the nearest airport. You then get an AI to try doing the same. As soon as the AI manages to get to the airport more often than the human, the tech will save lives, on average. My guess is a PhD student could come up with an AI passing the above test inside a year. Yet aviation standards are stringent enough AI will be decades away from production use, if ever.
      - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
        The political problem is that people still trust humans a lot more than they trust machines. So passengers would be nervous about being flown by an AI, even if the AI was safer. There's some weird psychology behind this: human pilots/drivers/etc are seen by passengers as a personal proxy, with agency over any situation. If you take away the proxy you take away the illusion of agency. Humans really do not like being put into situations where they believe they have no agency at all. As AI gets smarter, this will become more and more of a problem, until there some kind of cultural shift because AI is obviously safer it's not even a question any more. This may or may not happen.
      - notahacker 8y ago
        Your link to ZTE trumpeting the success of an algorithm helping an actual physical model of a quadcopter with a disabled rotor operating in lab conditions to crashland a bit more softly might be interpreted as a hint that the general case of safely landing a stricken aircraft is the sort of problem that probably isn't solved by a single PhD in a year... Keeping those with enough hubris to say "yeah, shouldn't take long if we've got some sort of sort of simulator to devise scenarios for a neural network to overfit to" about a wide range of failure modes that an entire field has spent decades studying well away from safety critical systems might be one of the more underappreciated aspects of tight regulation.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > For an example of this, did you know it's possible to fully control a quadcopter even with 3 out of 4 rotors broken and no working fins/flaps? The linked article does not support your point, it shows a quadcopter losing one rotor which then goes into a kind of 'controlled fall', two (or even three) rotors is never mentioned and even the one rotor missing scenario involves the whole craft spinning (see video on the page).
- theclaw 8y ago
  There also exists possibilities for far more danger. As you increase compute, you can run more code, and build more complicated interdependent components that are more difficult to test, especially for the sort of unexpected scenarios that "dynamic" behaviour would warrant. You would basically have a whole new plane - the opposite of what the 737 MAX 8 was intended to be.
wvenable 8y ago
> The "1990s Computing Power" comment is ignorantly harsh. I don't think so. You build a plane that's expected to run for decades -- if you put a 2010 computer in there now, it'll be 20 years old in 2030. That 1990's computer was put there in the 90's, does that really make it more reliable?
- pinewurst 8y ago
  That so-called 1990s computer is probably a year old, embedded in a Honeywell module that’ll be available new for the next 15 years.
  - wvenable 8y ago
    Of course. It's not literally a 1990's computer. But the idea that it's just somehow superior because the design is 3 decades old doesn't make any sense. 30 years ago it would have been new technology; so where was that same argument then?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - bronson 8y ago
      It's had 3 decades of experience and bugfixes.
      - wvenable 8y ago
        If new developing is happening, as it was in this case, that doesn't really matter. This problem was amplified by maintaining old technology, not mitigated by it.
        pinewurst 8y ago
        I don’t agree. The failure(s) weren’t in the old stuff, they were in the poor and ultimately unsafe cover-up (for lack of a better word) of the new. The CG change from the new engines specifically, being masked by new software, MCAS. The only old part culpable is the legacy 737 limit of 2 AoA sensors (with only 1 used for MCAS input (a new thing)).
BuildTheRobots 8y ago
The "1990's Computer Power" comment is factually correct. According to wikipedia, the AMD29000 processor was first released in 1988 and "In late 1995 AMD dropped development of the 29k..." I'm not commenting on whether that's appropriate to be running your aircraft or not, but it does very much seem to be a 1990's CPU running approx 50mhz.

londons_explore 8y ago

I'm not sure I agree here. There exist possibilities for far more safety with more compute. For example, when a mechanical failure occurs (for example an engine explodes and partially falls off) the flight characteristics of the plane change dramatically. Current systems fall back to human control, and hope that human will be able to figure out how to control a now very "unique" machine. Future systems could dynamically create new flight models based on collected data to be able to fly the machine in entirely new ways. For an example of this, did you know it's possible to fully control a quadcopter even with 3 out of 4 rotors broken and no working fins/flaps? [1]. That sort of 'fly it how it has never been done before' is out of reach of human control, and might save lives. [1]:. https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2013/12/new-algorithm-makes-quadrocopters-safer.html https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2013/12...

exelius 8y ago
This tech is just now making it into military aircraft in the F-35 (it’s designed to compensate for failures or combat damage while keeping the plane’s handling relatively consistent), so I would guess it’ll be a while before we see a civilian version.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  "Figure out a way to fly the thing in the new, crippled configuration" is hard. Figure out a way that's better than what the human pilot came up with may be even harder.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    It's hard, but it's a very measurable problem. You randomly deform the airframe in a physics simulator, then get a real pilot to try to fly the simulated damaged airframe to the nearest airport. You then get an AI to try doing the same. As soon as the AI manages to get to the airport more often than the human, the tech will save lives, on average. My guess is a PhD student could come up with an AI passing the above test inside a year. Yet aviation standards are stringent enough AI will be decades away from production use, if ever.
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      The political problem is that people still trust humans a lot more than they trust machines. So passengers would be nervous about being flown by an AI, even if the AI was safer. There's some weird psychology behind this: human pilots/drivers/etc are seen by passengers as a personal proxy, with agency over any situation. If you take away the proxy you take away the illusion of agency. Humans really do not like being put into situations where they believe they have no agency at all. As AI gets smarter, this will become more and more of a problem, until there some kind of cultural shift because AI is obviously safer it's not even a question any more. This may or may not happen.
    - notahacker 8y ago
      Your link to ZTE trumpeting the success of an algorithm helping an actual physical model of a quadcopter with a disabled rotor operating in lab conditions to crashland a bit more softly might be interpreted as a hint that the general case of safely landing a stricken aircraft is the sort of problem that probably isn't solved by a single PhD in a year... Keeping those with enough hubris to say "yeah, shouldn't take long if we've got some sort of sort of simulator to devise scenarios for a neural network to overfit to" about a wide range of failure modes that an entire field has spent decades studying well away from safety critical systems might be one of the more underappreciated aspects of tight regulation.
jacquesm 8y ago
> For an example of this, did you know it's possible to fully control a quadcopter even with 3 out of 4 rotors broken and no working fins/flaps? The linked article does not support your point, it shows a quadcopter losing one rotor which then goes into a kind of 'controlled fall', two (or even three) rotors is never mentioned and even the one rotor missing scenario involves the whole craft spinning (see video on the page).
theclaw 8y ago
There also exists possibilities for far more danger. As you increase compute, you can run more code, and build more complicated interdependent components that are more difficult to test, especially for the sort of unexpected scenarios that "dynamic" behaviour would warrant. You would basically have a whole new plane - the opposite of what the 737 MAX 8 was intended to be.

wvenable 8y ago

> The "1990s Computing Power" comment is ignorantly harsh. I don't think so. You build a plane that's expected to run for decades -- if you put a 2010 computer in there now, it'll be 20 years old in 2030. That 1990's computer was put there in the 90's, does that really make it more reliable?

pinewurst 8y ago
That so-called 1990s computer is probably a year old, embedded in a Honeywell module that’ll be available new for the next 15 years.
- wvenable 8y ago
  Of course. It's not literally a 1990's computer. But the idea that it's just somehow superior because the design is 3 decades old doesn't make any sense. 30 years ago it would have been new technology; so where was that same argument then?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - bronson 8y ago
    It's had 3 decades of experience and bugfixes.
    - wvenable 8y ago
      If new developing is happening, as it was in this case, that doesn't really matter. This problem was amplified by maintaining old technology, not mitigated by it.
      - pinewurst 8y ago
        I don’t agree. The failure(s) weren’t in the old stuff, they were in the poor and ultimately unsafe cover-up (for lack of a better word) of the new. The CG change from the new engines specifically, being masked by new software, MCAS. The only old part culpable is the legacy 737 limit of 2 AoA sensors (with only 1 used for MCAS input (a new thing)).

BuildTheRobots 8y ago

The "1990's Computer Power" comment is factually correct. According to wikipedia, the AMD29000 processor was first released in 1988 and "In late 1995 AMD dropped development of the 29k..." I'm not commenting on whether that's appropriate to be running your aircraft or not, but it does very much seem to be a 1990's CPU running approx 50mhz.