Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Two of the fatalities regarding partial or full self driving vehicles were examples of Byzantine Fault Tolerance

In the case of the Arizona bicyclist run over by a fully self driving vehicle with a back up human driver the systems were debating whether to stop or not. One system saw that something might be there (the bicyclist) on foot crossing in the dark and then another system countermanded that order which caused her death. The human driver never saw the bicyclist at all I believe until it was too late to stop.

Also, in the California incident the driver himself became the fatal straw in the Byzantine Fault Tolerance by not responding to any of the warning sounds that the car was making telling him to take over driving because it couldn't properly understand what was going on. Not responding to error messages resulted in a fatality when the driver who was occupied doing something else did not respond and died.

The third fatality in Florida where the driver was watching a "Harry Potter" movie was not a Byzantinei Fault Tolerance situation it was a completely perceptual failure of both the Tesla and the driver combined.

The Tesla perceived the semi crossing the road in front of the Tesla as a freeway or street sign instead of what it actually was which was a semi trailer crossing the road in front of the Tesla. So, when the Tesla went underneath the semi trailer and sheered off everything above the hood of the car, since the driver was watching "Harry Potter" it also sheered off his head and neck and part of his upper torso I believe.

So, the Florida fatality was not a Byzantine Fault Tolerance issue unless you consider the driver to be the failed part of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance situation. In the Florida fatality you have a vehicle thinking that the Semi Trailer was a street sign (which makes sense because often Semi Trailers advertise their products just like a street sign does. So, we may have more Florida type fatalities in this type of situation in the future from both Vehicle error and driver error combined. Or from just the vehicle error alone when there is no back up driver in a fully self driving vehicle that contains no driver or potential driver because there is no back up steering wheel or emergency manual braking system available at all to anyone. However, this likely will a more common cause of fatalities in other countries than the U.S. where self driving vehicle laws are more lax and therefore more fatalities are likely to occur because of those lax laws where manufacturers might be able to get away with faulty designs more.

However, over time, (maybe the next 20 to 50 years) likely self driving and partially self driving vehicles MIGHT BECOME safer (or not) depending upon many factors worldwide.

From my point of view they are not safe at any speed for some drivers at this point for a variety of reasons.

ONLY drivers with a good grasp of their technology and it's limitations will be safe for now.

And even then some of them will die in hardware or software and hardware byzantine Fault Tolerance situations as well as outright failures of all kinds both software and hardware over the next 20 to 50 years while most of the bugs of these things are worked out.

Byzantine fault tolerance - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance

Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is the dependability of a fault-tolerant computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component is failed. In a "Byzantine failure", a component such as a server can inconsistently appear both failed and ...

Understanding Blockchain Fundamentals, Part 1: Byzantine Fault ...

https://medium.com/.../understanding-blockchain-fundamentals-part-1-byzantine-fault...

Nov 30, 2017 - Understanding Blockchain Fundamentals, Part 1: Byzantine Fault Tolerance. Blockchains are inherently decentralized systems which consist of different actors who act depending on their incentives and on the information that is available to them. Whenever a new transaction gets broadcasted to the ...

Byzantine Fault Tolerance: The Key for Blockchains - Nasdaq.com

https://www.nasdaq.com/.../byzantine-fault-tolerance-the-key-for-blockchains-cm810...

Jun 29, 2017 - The characteristic known as " Byzantine fault tolerance " (BFT) is one of those concepts worth understanding. The ability to tolerate what computer scientists call "byzantine failures" is a crucial part of blockchains' ability to maintain reliable records of transactions in a transparent, tamper-proof way.


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