Terry Blanton wrote:
From: "Stephen A. Lawrence"
180 separate computers in the flight control system. Good luck
programming that baby... unless they're just little embedded processors
doing the job a FSM chip would have done a few years back.
The new rail cars purchased by MARTA have 150 computers. BUT, they don't fly!
And they probably are mostly "small" machines doing the jobs formerly
done by FSMs. In other words, each one is viewed as a black box with a
relatively simple interface by all the other 149 of them; there's very
limited cooperation. (They don't just operate in parallel -- they're
literally programmed in parallel by separate programmers working in
parallel.)
But the TAW-50 article claims that they're "superchips" (not little
embedded processors) and, later on, that they're programmed as an
advanced AI system (forget the exact words). The author over-reached to
the point where it doesn't sound reasonable any more -- sounds more like
Tony Stark's armor made from a flexible mesh of transistors...
I kinda like the hyberdart idea.
