Hi Adam,
On Wed, 2010-12-29 at 04:17 -0800, Adam Smith wrote:
> I wanted to share livecoding-relevant line of thought I've been on for
> a while. It ropes together space exploration, artificial intelligence,
> livecoding, and language/protocol design -- so I hope it's got
> something for everbody.
....
> I know my thoughts here aren't too well organized, but I think its an
> important new direction of thought that we toplappers are uniquely
> prepared to consider.
Interesting post. I can't find a link at the moment, but I remember
reading about how the mars rover was switched into some low level repl
mode for debugging as a last ditch (successful) attempt to get it
running near the start of the mission. Sending bytes back and forth with
20 minute delays and carefully bringing it up runlevels to find out why
it kept rebooting itself.
I think in the case of a long term mission where you'd want to be able
to cope with unforseen problems it would clearly makes sense to have the
sourcecode to the flight software and someone who could debug it
present.
The ideal solution would be some kind of modular reconfigurable system
that could be stripped down and built back up quickly with masses of
redundancy and self diagnosis. This would also make for an interesting
livecoding system :)
A good example of redundancy comes from the flight computers used on the
Soyuz, which calculates everything 3 times in parallel and votes on the
answer:
"Argon-11C computer contains three identical functionally independent
parallel channels with separate inputs and outputs. Majority control
circuits form the resulted information of the three channels. Data
synchronization is carried out by special signals transferred between
channels."
http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/argon.htm
cheers,
dave
Received on Wed Jan 05 2011 - 22:22:28 GMT