Core memory is very resistant to radiation. When the Shuttle computers were upgraded to semiconductor memory, radiation became an issue. The solution was to add six extra bits of storage to each word and use ECC. A background process scanned for errors and corrected them. The computer could encounter 100 bit flips per flight, so radiation was significant. (There was even an incident where a single cosmic ray flipped 14 bits.) The other problem with semiconductor memory was its volatility, so the computer had NiCd batteries for backup power to the RAM.
Please write an article about that French computer
Project idea: find 64kb kb of such memory and connect it somehow into Apple2, atari and other 8bit cpus hehe
It must be possible to have some hardware adapter to map RAM into that type of memory.
Or even over serial...
ps. Related story: around 10 years ago Texas Instruments started to use FRAM in some of their 16 bit MCUs (msp430 family)
It works exactly like core memory - data still intact after power resets.
Funny to see that frontpage as earlier on today I made a comment saying that with LLMs I'm betting we'll see N-modular redundancy systems soon, with a ultra-hardened, minimal, part picking the majority votes of N LLM-written implementations (in different languages, on different stacks, all running at the same time). Not 100% TFA but "computing in space" involved a lot of N-modular redundancy systems.
The reason I'm 99.9% sure we'll see that is that it'll help catch both bugs in the LLMs implementations themselves (and we know there are plenty of those) but also in the stacks/platforms/VMs running those software.
Imagine one spec and five implementations (Rust, Go, Java, Python, whatever) and one minimal system, with the tiniest of the tiniest attack surface, returning the answer as soon as 3-of-5 agree. And, as a bonus, if later on one the two "missing" answer arrives and doesn't match, it's cause for enquiry and bugs be smashed.
Basically (and although I don't care about Ethereum or cryptocurrencies except for the cryptographic aspect), we already witnessed that: 3 different implementations of Ethereum and, in the early days, one of the implementation whose result differed from the two others. And hence the implementation not respecting the spec (in that case it was the only one that was faulty) got instantly detected (and promptly patched). My memory is fuzzy but I know this happened.
Heck, I may write a proof-of-concept for fun.
I've got other ideas as to what will be possible in the future but I'm keeping them for another day.
annoyingnoob 57 minutes ago [-]
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For details on how radiation affected the Space Shuttle's computers, see this paper: https://klabs.org/DEI/Processor/shuttle/oneill_94.pdf
It must be possible to have some hardware adapter to map RAM into that type of memory.
Or even over serial...
ps. Related story: around 10 years ago Texas Instruments started to use FRAM in some of their 16 bit MCUs (msp430 family)
It works exactly like core memory - data still intact after power resets.
The reason I'm 99.9% sure we'll see that is that it'll help catch both bugs in the LLMs implementations themselves (and we know there are plenty of those) but also in the stacks/platforms/VMs running those software.
Imagine one spec and five implementations (Rust, Go, Java, Python, whatever) and one minimal system, with the tiniest of the tiniest attack surface, returning the answer as soon as 3-of-5 agree. And, as a bonus, if later on one the two "missing" answer arrives and doesn't match, it's cause for enquiry and bugs be smashed.
Basically (and although I don't care about Ethereum or cryptocurrencies except for the cryptographic aspect), we already witnessed that: 3 different implementations of Ethereum and, in the early days, one of the implementation whose result differed from the two others. And hence the implementation not respecting the spec (in that case it was the only one that was faulty) got instantly detected (and promptly patched). My memory is fuzzy but I know this happened.
Heck, I may write a proof-of-concept for fun.
I've got other ideas as to what will be possible in the future but I'm keeping them for another day.