4 ms·
If computers were fully deterministic, we wouldn't need error correcting ram. The abstracted design of the machine is meant to be deterministic, but you can't
by goodmythical 10d ago
If computers were fully deterministic, we wouldn't need error correcting ram.
The abstracted design of the machine is meant to be deterministic, but you can't predict before running any command whether or not it will complete because there are externalities that effect the outcome.
Electromagnetic interference even happens in-chip where an electron can accidentally escape it's wire and enter another, possibly resulting in an error, but not every time.
It's even been used as an attack vector where rapidly flipping a bit increases the likelihood that a neighbor bit is also flipped, but the method is probabalistic, not deterministic.
- qarl 10d agoYes. In theory they are deterministic. In practice, not so much.
- budman1 10d agoThose non-deterministic results are exceedingly rare.
- qarl 10d agoWhen human input is involved, like I described elsewhere, it happens frequently.
- lioeters 10d agoAs long as the machine is part of the larger universe, and not completely isolated in its own bubble of space-time (an impossible situation, an object without an environment) - it cannot be purely deterministic because of the fundamental nature of physics.
- mitxela 10d agoSo your theory is that arithmetic is nondeterministic because very rarely a calculator will say 1+1=3.
- lioeters 9d agoArithmetic is deterministic, because it is abstract. A calculator or computer is not, because it is physical and exists in a non-deterministic universe. But with error correction, etc., it's deterministic enough for practical purposes. For more in-depth explanation, start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminism