Possible thesis?
February 14, 2009
Here’s an interesting idea, that may or may not have been visited in the past : distributed computing! Yes, distributed computing is already a popular field of study, but using it in hopes to check the validity of a result using redundancy? Now that’s something!
Consider this :
If you were living inside a space station, with automated critical systems that control things such as the amount of oxygen in the air, the amount of pesticides to use on food, ran diagnostics on various other hardware, would you trust your life to one processor and accompanying software? What would happen if a virus was developed, what would happen in case of a computational error? Would you ever feel secure knowing that could happen?
Now, what if instead of one ‘computer’ made critical decisions, multiple computers made these decisions. What if the decision had to be ‘approved’ by multiple computers? I’d rather not go into too much detail just yet, but think of it like a bureaucracy. For a decision to be made, the majority of computers have to agree to it. And how would they come to such an agreement? Simply put, by comparing their outcomes that result from similar inputs. That is to say, put input X into computer A and B, if A.X = B.X then all is alright (unless of course both miscalculated in the same way [possible causes : virus, dumb luck], more on this later), otherwise if A.X != B.X then a problem is flagged and the computers will notify a human as well as initiate diagnostics on themselves.
Hmm?
