Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!gatech!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!buengc!bph
From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Core memory
Message-ID: <522@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 23 Jul 88 18:26:31 GMT
References: <1486@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <1010@garth.UUCP> <458@buengc.BU.EDU> <1887@stpstn.UUCP> <1057@garth.UUCP>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.misc
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 20

In article <1057@garth.UUCP> smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) writes:
>>                                             EEPROMS are, I believe,
>>too sensitive to large, powerful cosmic rays that tend to buzz around up there.
>
>Somewhat afield, I guess, unless we include ai, but if semiconductors can be
>fried by the radiation, what happens to humans?

Mutations rather than data loss.  Humans store information chemically and
physically, and it takes a rather large effort to change that information
significantly.  In contrast, semiconductors store info in binary codes
such that changing even one bit changes the entire message, especially
when it comes to processor opcodes.  Further, human mentation is
naturally noisy; hence, a few cosmic-ray-induced, synaptic blips aren't
going to be noticed.  In summary, Brains is Still Superior to Computerz
in Almost Every Way (exception, e.g.: you couldn't handle Arithmetic Shift
Left when you were two days out of the shop...)

				--Blair
				  "No parity bits for me, thanx,
				   I'm driving..."