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A surprisingly simple bug afflicts computers controlling planes, spacecraft and more – they get confused by big numbers. As Chris Baraniuk discovers, the glitch has led to explosions, missing space probes and more.
Tuesday, 4 June 1996 will forever be remembered as a dark day for the European Space Agency (Esa). The first flight of the crewless Ariane 5 rocket, carrying with it four very expensive scientific satellites, ended after 39 seconds in an unholy ball of smoke and fire. It's estimated that the explosion resulted in a loss of $370m (£240m).
What happened? It wasn't a mechanical failure or an act of sabotage. No, the launch ended in disaster thanks to a simple software bug. A computer getting its maths wrong – essentially getting overwhelmed by a number bigger than it expected.
How is it possible that computers get befuddled by numbers in this way? It turns out such errors are answerable for a series of disasters and mishaps in recent years, destroying rockets, making space probes go missing, and sending missiles off-target. So what are these bugs, and why do they happen?
Imagine trying to represent a value of, say, 105,350 miles on an odometer that has a maximum value of 99,999. The counter would "roll over" to 00,000 and then count up to 5,350, the remaining value. This is the same species of inaccuracy that doomed the 1996 Ariane 5 launch. More technically, it's called "integer overflow", essentially meaning that numbers are too big to be stored in a computer system, and sometimes this can cause malfunction.
Such glitches emerge with surprising frequency. It's suspected that the reason why Nasa lost contact with the Deep Impact space probe in 2013 was an integer limit being reached.
And just last week it was reported that Boeing 787 aircraft may suffer from a similar issue. The control unit managing the delivery of power to the plane's engines will automatically enter a failsafe mode – and shut down the engines – if it has been left on for over 248 days.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bootsy on Thursday May 07 2015, @12:15PM
I had always been told this was due to the Ada language the software was written in throwing an exception and this exception overwriting an area of memory that held the rocket direction variables. Since the whole thing was embedded there was only a small working area of memory. If you've ever programmed in Ada you will know it is very fussy ( read type safe ) and I believe it was the first language to implement exceptions although I'm sure a reply will turn up showing an example before this.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:17PM
Like all revolutionary programming paradigms, exception handling was first implemented/invented in Lisp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_handling#Exception_handling_in_software [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 2) by bootsy on Friday May 08 2015, @08:21AM
Thanks for link. I love this quote about Ada from it, so relevant.
"...a plethora of features and notational conventions, many of them unnecessary and some of them, like exception handling, even dangerous. [...] Do not allow this language in its present state to be used in applications where reliability is critical[...]. The next rocket to go astray as a result of a programming language error may not be an exploratory space rocket on a harmless trip to Venus: It may be a nuclear warhead exploding over one of our own cities."