The majority gate


Imagine, you have a homebuilt rocket...
or a homebuilt reactor, as the one thing
doesn't necessarily exclude the other.

To control your new toy, you need a computer.
And that's where trouble starts.

Imagine, that your little computer is getting
the hickups, maybe due to heat, to radiation,
or to a cute little software bug.

The result may burn an enormous amount of money,
and/or an enormous amount of Earth's surface.

To be on the safe side, engineers soon had the idea
of integrating three computers into their dangerous toy
(preferably computers with different hardware and
software, if there was enough time and money
available for their project).

The basic idea was, that one computer might fail,
but that two computers won't fail at the same time.

So the computers always did a vote:
if the majority of the computers said
"up with the rocket" or "up with the control rods",
something went into motion.

If the majority of the computers said "do nothing",
nothing happened.

Now for our majority gate, which connects those
three computers Alpha, Beta and Charly to the
servo motor Queer:

When using standard logic gates to build such a
majority gate, it will look like this:

But there is another approach...


[HOME] [UP]/ [BACK] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [NEXT]

(c) Dieter Mueller 2009