WorldWide Drilling Resource

Respecting Our Computational Limits by Britt Storkson Owner, P2FlowLLC Everything has limits. Nothing is limitless. Computers, while they can do some incredible things, have their limits as well. The issue here is not that there are limits . . . the issue is about respecting those limitations, because if we do not respect those limitations, the computer will either not function or malfunction. This exercise is no different than respecting other physical limitations like load rat- ings for steel support beams. If we respect the limits determined by the manufacturer, most likely we will be fine. If we do not respect them, then there will likely be problems. Computer capabilities are no different. I found the article “Franken-algorithms: The deadly consequences of unpredictable code” by Andrew Smith in The UK Guardian interesting and have included some excerpts: . . . “At first the computer drew a blank; seconds later, it decided it was dealing with another car, expecting it to drive away and require no special action. Only at the last second was a clear identification found - a woman with a bike, shopping bags hanging confusingly from handlebars, doubtless assuming the Volvo would route around her as any ordinary vehicle would. Barred from taking evasive action on its own, the computer abruptly handed control back to its human master, but the master wasn’t paying attention. Elaine Herzberg, aged 49, was struck and killed, leaving more reflective members of the tech community with two uncomfortable questions: was this algorithmic tragedy inevitable? And how used to such incidents would we, should we, be prepared to get? Where safety is at stake, this really matters. When a driver ran off the road and was killed in a Toyota Camry after appearing to accelerate wildly for no obvious rea- son, [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] experts spent six months exam- ining the millions of lines of code in its operating system, without finding evidence for what the driver’s family believed had occurred, but the manufacturer steadfastly denied - that the car had accelerated of its own accord. Only when a pair of embedded software experts spent 20 months digging into the code were they able to prove the family’s case, revealing a twisted mass of what programmers call “spaghetti code”, full of algorithms that jostled and fought, generating anomalous, unpredictable output. The autonomous cars currently being tested may contain [approximately 328 feet] lines of code and, given that no programmer can anticipate all possible circumstances on a real-world road, they have to learn and receive constant updates. How do we avoid clashes in such a fluid code milieu, not least when the algorithms may also have to defend themselves from hackers? Was this a result of poor programming, insufficient algorithmic training or a hubristic refusal to appreciate the limits of our technology? The real problem is that we may never know. . . . Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales who wrote his first program at age 13 and ran a tyro [novice] computing business by his late teens, explains from a technical perspective why this is. ‘No one knows how to write a piece of code to recognize a stop sign. We spent years trying to do that kind of thing in [artificial intelligence] - and failed! It was rather stal led by our stupidi ty, because we weren’t smart enough to learn how to break the problem down. You discover when you program, that you have to learn how to break the problem down into simple enough parts that each can correspond to a computer instruction [to the machine]. We just don’t know how to do that for a very complex problem like identifying a stop sign or translating a sentence from English to Russian - it’s beyond our capa- bility. All we know is how to write a more general purpose algorithm that can learn how to do that, given enough examples.’” Britt Britt Storkson may be contacted via e-mail to michele@ worldwidedrillingresource.com New & Used Bits, HDD Bits & Tools, Drag Bits & Wings, Bolt-On Drag Bits, Reverse Circulation Tools, Hole Openers, Claw Bits, Stabilizers, Subs, Custom Tooling & Welding, Hammer Bits, Drill Collars, Pipe Wipers, and Drill Pipe. Office: (661) 834-4348 Rod Henderson / Eran Henderson 661-201-6259 • 661-330-0790 sales@bitcobits.com www.bitcoinc.us 19 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® DECEMBER 2018