Re: Race condition...

[Larry Dickson <tjoccam@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

It seems to me we need to educate the regulators and designers. The key is discontinuous response. To test again by doing much the same thing is no test. Example: random keyboard input to

Become fiery ball? [N,y]

where the N means the default answer is "no". That means you have to have a y followed by an Enter to get a fiery ball, which is about a 1 in 6000 chance on an 80-key keyboard. So the retest is unlikely to reproduce the error, but it will kill a lot of people among millions of users.

Once they understand this, the question becomes how to design a continuous response with no exceptions. Answer: not any of the ways that have become standard in the last 20 years. (I just bought an Arduino and looked at its textbook, "Making Things Talk," to get a naive view of how the world of embedded control is trending, and there are ill-defined abstracted layers everywhere.)

Larry Dickson

On Mar 15, 2010, at 6:09 AM, Bob Gustafson wrote:

> Just needs a dose of Formal Methods..
> 
> and/or Model Checking..
> 
> More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods
> 
> Bob G
> 
> On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 08:52 -0400, Marc L. Smith wrote:
>> ...of one kind--or another!    ;-)
>> 
>> Prius Incident Stumps Investigators
>> By REUTERS
>> Published: March 15, 2010
>> http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/03/15/business/business-us-toyota-prius-investigation.html?_r=1&hp
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
>