Andres Tarzia wrote:

> Wagner,
>
> The Space Shuttle has some 5 main independent computers, each one "thinking"
> alone (that is, measuring, computing, evaluating and deciding) and they
> "vote" in real time to decide what to do. The technology is really
> impressive. But even THAT technology was designed in the 70's and early
> 80's.
>

As a CS academic I have to raise a caution here: 5 computers is NOT ENOUGH to
decide/vote.  If you wish to engineer a fail-safe/fail-operational system, it
takes 3k+1 entities to achieve concensus in the presence of k failures.  It
seems to be pretty common practice to engineer in "a" redundant system -
unfortunately "a" redundant system doesn't buy you much.  There was an
excellent survey of the concensus problem in the early 1990's in IEEE Computer
(even made the front page, I believe).

/Kevin