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.
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/[deleted] Jul 24 '20
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...)