Re:Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens
by camkego on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @05:44AM
(#21871115)
Yeah, this is a key insight, and something I didn't learn as a software developer with many years of experience until I studied probability formally. Maybe these days this is better known. This is also known as the inclusion-exclusion principal and can be used to model failure probability.
Re:Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens
by ethbro on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @10:14AM
(#21872536)
Thanks for the term! That's combinatorics, so I probably should have remembered it. :/
There are a lot of things I'd love to know the accepted name for, as I came into understanding through the backdoor. I regret that my college CS track didn't include more borrow-courses from physical engineering on reliability (and control theory). So many valuable, applicable lessons.
Most complex engineering projects are hard not because of one thing, but because of the mind-bogglingly large number of things that must all be done correctly.
(1 - x) ^ y, where x is the chance of each small mistake and y is the total number of opportunities, doesn't need a very large x, if y is large enough, for things to start looking dicey.