I thought we already had a way to deal with bit flips. CPU bit flips should be common by now because of the size of processors these days.
Imagine this happening today…
Ok, I’ll bite: what’s a “cosmic ray bit-flip”?
So basically, we have low level neutron radiation coming at us at all times from space. Mostly from our own sun, some other external sources too. It takes a whole lot of concrete or lead or water to stop that completely, so anything that makes it through our atmosphere is harmlessly passing through all of us.
But since things like computer RAM and other electronic storage have gotten so much smaller, this radiation is now capable of energizing or discharging individual bits — 1s or 0s — in that storage. Imagine you’re in the hospital for a back operation and the robot arm is approaching a 1 bit that tells it to stop… but that 1 flips to a 0 because the sun sneezed and now your spine is in two fun-sized pieces.
This is all mostly moot today, though. ECC-enabled RAM (memory with protections against bit flips) is the norm and this is a pretty well-understood problem.
One definitely could be made. That physics caused a miscount in a local election iirc. That’s probably a good movie premise.
In case you’re missing it, this is what the Stephen King book and movie “Maximum Overdrive” is about, but technologically behind by 50 years. Radio signals and power surges just happen to influence machines all over the world into vengefully killing people.
Nearly every computer you use, including the ones people are starting to use for self-driving, can have their memory accidentally modified from cosmic rays
We try really hard to protect spaceships from them, since they’re subject to more
However, due to the law of large numbers, sometimes your computer will get random bit flips - where it should be a 0, but it’s instead a 1, or vice versa
Explain?
More computers dealing with more parts of your life increases the chance that a bit flip has a negative effect
Computers store everything as electric current. If the current is on it’s a one. If the current is off it’s a zero. High energy particles from outer space regularly blast through our upper atmosphere into the Earth passing through most solid matter. These high energy particles can induce the electric currents when they impact computer components. These erant current can cause a one to become a zero or a zero to become a one. This can have all kinds of interesting effects depending on which zero and one got changed when and where. Normally this causes a crash of the program or operating system.
