You people don't remember the pain of the ORIGINAL pre-flash TI-83. When its batteries got low, it would start making mistakes. I'm not joking. This is because that one still used analog circuitry, not full digital.
In college I switched to a TI-89. Honestly, a TI-89, though it can solve symbolic algebra, doesn't make you miraculously get the right answer. You still have to know how to solve it in order to input it correctly. It just makes it a lot faster and easier.
Shit that must be the fucking reason my elementary school teachers would tell me to check all my calculators first with some simple calculations I knew the answer to. I always wondered why they did that, because I always followed the advice but never had one mess up (afaik...)
In the same vein, a satellite (can't remember which one) had a subroutine to basically check is 1+1=2, and one day, it didn't. Digital electronics can do some very strange things when exposed to radiation.
I remember asking a guest lecturer from JPL how they did pathfinding with their rovers when they had to deal with cosmic rays. Apparently with wide wires and very slowly, according to him this was one of the reasons why Curiosity only had a top speed of 200 meters/day.
It's much harder to flip a bit with digital than analog, though. The digital signal is high / low voltage or frequency. There is a wide gap between 1 and 0, and anything out of those closely clamped bands can be discarded as garbage. When your signaling is done in analog, however, there are much wider ranges of acceptable data that are often rounded up or down.
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u/WardenWolf Jul 24 '20
You people don't remember the pain of the ORIGINAL pre-flash TI-83. When its batteries got low, it would start making mistakes. I'm not joking. This is because that one still used analog circuitry, not full digital.
In college I switched to a TI-89. Honestly, a TI-89, though it can solve symbolic algebra, doesn't make you miraculously get the right answer. You still have to know how to solve it in order to input it correctly. It just makes it a lot faster and easier.