Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 16 submissions in the queue.
posted by martyb on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the if-it-walks-like-a-duck,-sinks-like-a-duck,-oh,-wait... dept.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The duck boat that sank in a Missouri lake last week, killing 17 people, was built based on a design by a self-taught entrepreneur who had no engineering training, according to court records reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.

The designer, entrepreneur Robert McDowell, completed only two years of college and had no background, training or certification in mechanics when he came up with the design for "stretch" duck boats more than two decades ago, according to a lawsuit filed over a roadway disaster in Seattle involving a similar duck boat in 2015.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:46PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:46PM (#713358)

    Yes, Waymo is using a different model and they are testing in depth, for example see this recent press release,
        https://www.automotivetestingtechnologyinternational.com/news/vehicle-testing/fca-us-adds-62000-chrysler-pacifica-hybrid-minivans-waymos-self-driving-fleet.html [automotivetestingtechnologyinternational.com]

    Yes -- they are adding 62 000 minivans to their test fleet. For comparison, that's double the number of vehicles made in total by Tesla in the first quarter this year.

    The old saying that you can't "test in reliability" may still be true, but, if you do enough testing, maybe you can approach a acceptable level of reliability?

  • (Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday July 26 2018, @09:57PM (1 child)

    by Knowledge Troll (5948) on Thursday July 26 2018, @09:57PM (#713384) Homepage Journal

    if you do enough testing, maybe you can approach a acceptable level of reliability?

    I'm not looking forward to a future where we can no longer prove a control system is operating correctly. We are going from control systems based on state transition charts and a dynamics model that can be analyzed and proven to have the properties that it is designed for. There can be errors in design that lead to problems but fundamentally you can go back and say "this is exactly what went wrong".

    You can't do that with a NN control system. The best you can say is "we made a test case and it no longer faults in that test case." Maybe in the future as network analysis gets better but certainly not right now.