What causes computerized technology to screw up so often (glitches, freezes, shutdowns) if its all based on calculations?
In: Technology
Garbage in Garbage out, meaning human error.
Computer glitches by calculation error ARE SUPER ALMOST NONEXISTENT rare.
But shitty coding and bugs are common.
If you have a infinite loop in your app, call X which calls up Y which refers back to X, will take the computer on a journey, which ends you pissed off and the computer glitching out.
Sometimes the computer can powerthrough these, but it doesn’t solve it, it’s just there, and with more and more of these oversights, the computer breaks. forcing a shutdown.
The reason for most mysterious computer problems is precisely because computer programs follow precise logical pathway, even when a human wouldn’t.
Consider a program that wants to load an image. It expects the image to be stored in a file called image.jpg. It tries to load that file, but it doesn’t exist (maybe someone else deleted/moved/renamed the file). The program wants to load image.jpg. It tires to load the file, but it doesn’t exist. The program wants to load image.jpg. It tries to load the file, but it doesn’t exist… And so on.
A human would give up quickly on trying to load the image, or maybe try looking elsewhere. A computer will try forever. A lot of making code robust to bugs is explicitly telling the computer to be less deterministic. In this case, you would want code that, instead of saying “load image.jpg” says “Try to load image.jpg for 5 seconds, then give up.”
Computers do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do. Technically they just do the computations, but if they do the wrong ones or if they’re in the wrong order, bad stuff happens.
Humans are the ones that tell computers to do and humans aren’t perfect. The things we expect computers to do are more and more complicated and rely on coordination with lots of other people. Any mistake or miscommunication results in computations about the wrong thing or with wrong information.
At some point, the wrong information causes errors. The computer might have instructions to do something that can’t be done with its own resources, or it might be told to do something that leads it into an infinite loop, or it might run into a scenario it doesn’t have instructions for.
I would guess it would have to do with the millions of yes/no decisions it makes every minute or the ability to process them on a highly complexly built rock
Someone said it earlier, but computers do not do what they want you do, they do what you tell them to do. I have had to tell this to my fellow software engineers. A computer will follow the exact pathway, the exact set of instructions it has been given. So for example, if the UI has not been coded efficiently to prevent re-rendering of a web app, it will re-render unnecessarily and cause issues because it’s just following instructions.
One possible error is an out of memory error. There are physical limitations on any one computer. When the programs exceed that limitation, bad things start to happen. Freezing occurs as there is no memory left to store things anymore. The Java Virtual Machine throws an `OutOfMemoryError` when this occurs. The Operating System then frantically tries to kill processes to get back some leeway in memory.
The last thing you should keep in mind is that computers rely on hardware like the CPU. These are not guaranteed to be 100% defect free, which can cause issues as well.
Technology seldom screws up. It’s the programmers who screw up and send the computer off doing the wrong calculations, possibly even in an endless loop.
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