Re: OT?: AF 447 and avionics software

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sat, 6 Jun 2009 03:38:50 -0700 (PDT), sjw wrote:

> On Jun 5, 8:22�am, MRE <Marc.Enzm...@web.de> wrote:
> 
>> The rocket scientist that came to this brilliant conclusion seems to
>> be a real expert in the field of complexity theory.
>> Thing is: even if you use analog electronics 50's style you can not be
>> sure that you have checked all possible combinations of events.
> 
> I think the difference is that analog systems tend to break in much
> less complex ways than digital ones. A run-time exception is likely to
> result in catastrophic and unpredictable misbehaviours. Who would have
> thought that buffer overflows could lead to botnets overloading the
> net with spam?

Analogue systems are continuous, whatever complexity a continuous system
has it stay to some extent predictable. On the contrary a very simple
discrete system exposes unpredictable behavior upon small changes like a
single toggled bit in a floating-point number representation.

However it is quite possible that very this instability of discrete systems
in the end allows us to solve problems, which we could not using analogue
systems.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de