Bit Flips
In Belgium, something had obviously gone wrong with an electronic voting machine: it was showing a mathematically impossible distribution of votes. The analysis of what had happened makes for an interesting podcast , as narrated by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen. The experts were called in. They got all the ballots and reinserted and recounted them. The difference between the first and second count was 4096 votes. If you’re from a maths/computer science background, that number would be familiar. Yes, it 2 x 2 x 2… 13 times . I won’t get into how computer memory works, but suffice to say that the number mismatch (4096) is a hint that something had flipped (only) the 13 th bit of the vote count on that one machine. The team tested the software. No bugs there. Then they checked the hardware on the machine. No issue there either. Ok, but if it’s not hardware or software, what are we left with to look at?! Well, in theory a cosmic ray could flip a bit if it ...