One of the reasons computer programs are so brittle is that everything is digital, so a single bit flip could massively change a value. Operating purely on intuition, then, perhaps we could help make our systems less brittle if we gave more redundancy to higher order bits. We’d waste space, sure, but space is cheap. Small errors would then hopefully have small effects.
(…time passes…)
This idea will probably never work, as I bet computer programs are wildly chaotic, and that if you give them data that is the same except for a few of the lower-order bits, you would still get wildly different results. Must think on this further in an effort to articulate exactly what kind of problem this would be solving.
Ah well, in an effort to not have this idea again, it goes into the idea bin along with the rest.
