4 ms·
I'd always prefer an algorithm to be correct 100% of the time than any rate than 100%. This is the type of thing for which there is no fundamental reason why yo
by forrestthewoods 12y ago
I'd always prefer an algorithm to be correct 100% of the time than any rate than 100%. This is the type of thing for which there is no fundamental reason why you can't simply do it right. The more things you can do right the less you have to worry about! It's much simpler.
That said, I'd certainly listen to the tradeoffs of being correct 100% of the time vs being wrong a mere 1 in 2^1020 times. I wonder if 2^-1020 is greater than or less than the chance of a cosmic ray flipping a bit...
- Dylan16807 12y agoIt's far far far smaller of a chance than a memory error. Unimaginably smaller. Now that I think about it, smaller enough that the execution time difference makes it more dangerous to check. :)
- forrestthewoods 12y agoSince I was curious, it appears that IBM did research in the 90s and came up with 1 per 256mb RAM per month. That's 3.7 × 10-9 per byte per month or 1.4 × 10-15 per byte per second. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what-is-the-probability-they-will-affect-a-program http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what-...
- cma 12y agoThe surface area of 256MB of ram has shrunk a lot since then.
- Dylan16807 12y agoThough the bits have gotten more fragile.