3 ms·
Computers then were like computers now... It's one thing to get python to spit out an answer to your problem, but it's quite a bit harder to be sure it's spi
by londons_explore 3y ago
Computers then were like computers now... It's one thing to get python to spit out an answer to your problem, but it's quite a bit harder to be sure it's spitting out the right answer.
If I was the supervisor in the above situation, I wouldn't let them cut those corners, since it's far more important to get the right answer when $2B of project could be led down totally the wrong path if a calculation tells you you need 10x less/more uranium than reality because someone shuffled up some punch cards wrong...
- bewaretheirs 3y agoWe're not talking about programming errors, but malfunctions in the hardware producing incorrect results - whatever the electromechanical equivalent of a bitflip is. Given the error rates described by Feynman, if they had to restart the entire computation from scratch after a single detected error they'd likely never have completed the task.
- samatman 3y ago> whatever the electromechanical equivalent of a bitflip is It's a bitflip. Just one that makes a surprisingly loud chunkk noise.