The Universe is Hostile to Computers

Veritasium · 26.5M views · 2021-08-31 · 23:03

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Overview

Veritasium explains how cosmic rays and other particles flip bits in computer memory, with examples including a Belgian election count error, plane incidents and game glitches. It is inspired by a RadioLab episode on bit flips.

On Hacker News

Commenters link it whenever bit flips, cosmic ray errors or unexplained computer glitches come up, as a good accessible explanation.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2021–2024

Topics

Computer architecture & CPUs Everyday physics & science demos Fundamental physics

What people said

shmde · 2022-05 · Recommendation
People interested in knowing more about Bitflip. "The Universe is Hostile to Computers" by Veritasium is good video. [VIDEO]
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passion__desire · 2024-08 · Reference
There is no software at all, it is all hardware. These are mere abstractions because the reality offers some guarantees which allows one to transfer one system onto another as if the underlying system didn't matter. Those guarantees allows one to speak of commonalities between one stuff and another. ref : The Universe is Hostile to Computers [VIDEO]
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Etherlord87 · 2024-01 · Reference
> There's an extent to which I think this is reasonable. If I'm accused of fraud based on evidence recovered from a bank computer, it should not be the case that I can require the prosecution to prove that the bank's computers function correctly, and the evidence be thrown out in case the prosecution are unable to do so. So a poor individual with no resources should find experts to analyze a software he doesn't even have access to (I know, discovery, but the practical limitations often make it near impossible to find the error within a given time, like having the access only in an isolated room without the internet or your own software, or having an access only to printed source code on paper), rather than the prosecutor (the state) or the company that definitely have the resources? Obviously almost no one would go to jail then. But this would be because of a very low coding standard. You pretty much can't prove the validity of software, because somewhere around 99,99% just isn't coded in a language and regime that would guarantee being bug-free. Check out the video by Veritasium "The Universe is Hostile to Computers" [1] - how much software, do you think, has internal error correction implemented to deal with a possible cosmic ray flipping a bit? The solution is to have extensive logs of data, stored by independent actors, with a lot of redundancy or otherwise error detection and correction. I find it horrifying that someone as well versed in law as you is fine with putting
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Sources

Video by Veritasium, played through YouTube.

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