Re:Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
by jacquesm on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @12:17PM
(#14194957)
> nuclear energy, air traffic control, bank systems and automated train lines don't crash nearly as often, for example.
Bank systems crash with great regularity. Source: worked for a bank, customer of a bank.
Industrial systems and anything related to flight is typically much better from a design point of view than your average bit of firmware. Redundancy is built in from the first day and all failure modes are tested in so much as feasible.
Also, and this is very important, such software is kept as simple as possible to reduce the surface area bugs can hide in.
Re:Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
by notahacker on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @12:44PM
(#14195344)
Also, all of these are much simpler problems than fully-autonomous operation of a vehicle on a regular road surrounded by other users, which involves teaching the system how to deal with an enormously long list of edge cases.
I don't envy people tasked with balancing the need for self-driving car software to be able to handle a sufficiently large number of possibilities to consider eliminating the driver with the need for it to have a small surface area and sufficient degree of tractability to be able to minimise bugs.
Re:Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
by monkmartinez on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @12:33PM
(#14195188)
Also! Don't forget how expensive this software is... This puts it out of reach for like 97% of the world.
Being such an important feature (not crashing) it shouldn't be ignored. I am also skeptical but we have examples of reliable systems so I believe they can work.