The narrative describes a series of events that took place on May 18, 2003, during an election in Belgium. The story revolves around a candidate named Maria Vindevogel who unexpectedly received more votes than possible, leading to an election recount. The discrepancy was traced back to a flipped bit in a computer system used for vote tabulation.
The computer system used a binary system, with each bit corresponding to a power of two. Maria's vote count started at zero and incremented by one for each vote she received. The unexpected number of votes she received (4096) corresponds to the 13th power of two. The investigators concluded that the 13th bit had to flip from a zero to a one to inflate Maria's vote count.
The investigators found that this kind of bit flip, known as a single event upset, is caused by high-energy particles like cosmic rays. These particles can cause bit flips in semiconductor memory, which computers use to store data. The investigators theorized that a cosmic ray caused the bit flip that gave Maria her extra votes.
The narrative also mentions a similar incident that occurred in 1996 when a plane experienced unexpected pitch changes during a flight. The investigators concluded that a bit flip in the plane's flight computer caused the incident. This case is a stark reminder of the potential risks of cosmic ray-induced bit flips in critical systems.
The story ends with Maria Vindevogel being elected to the Belgian Chamber of Representatives, a testament to the resilience of democratic processes despite unexpected challenges. The narrative concludes with a call to action, encouraging viewers to solve diverse problems to maintain their problem-solving skills.
1. An election recount was triggered in Belgium on May 18, 2003, due to an invisible phenomenon that permeates the universe.
2. The recount was caused by an error in the computer system used for voting, which resulted in Maria Vinde Vogel, a little-known candidate, receiving more votes than mathematically possible.
3. The error was traced back to a single bit flip, specifically the 13th bit, which flipped from a zero to a one.
4. The bit flip was caused by a cosmic ray, a high-energy particle from space, that struck a transistor in the computer.
5. The cosmic ray was detected on October 15, 1991, and had an energy of 51 joules, equivalent to a baseball going a hundred kilometers per hour.
6. Cosmic rays are primarily composed of protons, helium nuclei, and heavier nuclei. Some of them are from the sun but they have comparatively low energy.
7. High-energy cosmic rays moving very close to the speed of light come from exploding stars and supernovae. The highest energy particles are thought to come from black holes, including the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.
8. Cosmic rays can trigger bit flips in electronic devices, altering their function and causing a single event functional interrupt, which can cause an entire process to hang.
9. Cosmic rays have been shown to cause crashes of supercomputers, especially at higher elevations.
10. The increase in radiation at higher altitudes can increase the chance of a single event upset by 10 to 30 times.
11. On October 7, 2008, an Airbus A330 experienced a sudden dive due to a bit flip in the first eight bits of data in the inertial reference unit (ATARU), mislabeling altitude information as angle of attack information.
12. The Airbus A330 was built in 1992, when there were no specific regulatory or aircraft manufacturer requirements for airborne systems to be resilient to single event effects.
13. The Space Shuttle has redundancy built in from the start for navigation and control, with four computers simultaneously running identical software.
14. The computer on the Perseverance Rover, which landed on Mars in 2021, is 20 years old and is radiation hardened, meaning the design materials, circuits, and software are built to withstand 40 times the radiation of an ordinary computer.
15. The flux of cosmic rays on Earth is much lower when the sun is active than when it's dormant, and this protection fluctuates with the sun's 11-year activity cycle.
16. Cosmic rays may have played an even larger role in flipping bits not in electronics but in the genetic codes of living organisms, providing some of the variation on which natural selection acts.
17. Maria Vindevogel, the candidate who received 4096 extra votes due to a cosmic ray, is now a member of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives.
18. The cosmic ray that caused the error in the computer system used for voting is still unidentified.