Gentlemen,
my thanks to
oldengmkr for posting some links of high interest.
To the attention of those interested in my preferred subject which is flight controls and their potential for lethal mischief, if I may, I would like to gently suggest reading these highly theoretical, mind-numbing documents :
AG RVS - Computer-Related Incidents with Commercial Aircraft
Byzantine fault tolerance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://www.ann.ece.ufl.edu/courses/e...l%20System.pdf
In very short : Byzantine faults are those special failures where faulty data gets propagated. Relevant ?
The general effect of these faults is erratic or unpredictable system behaviour. I am talking flight controls sytem here. Relevant ?
The theoretical response to these particularly obnoxious faults lies in the direction of 'distributed' and 'reconfigurable' architecture for a computer system. The last link points to a paper that was published in October 2009, and produced by a team of scientists and a select few engineers from the thread subject matter manufacturer. Relevant ?
At least, I for one find this concept of Byzantine fault very much relevant to our present mystery. Applied to flight controls, it certainly gives me the creeps.
Svarin
Edit : first link was posted by oldengmkr, thanks again, very enlightening.