Cosmic Ray Bit Flips and the Hidden Risk at Scale
15 days ago
- #speedrunning-glitch
- #cosmic-ray-bit-flip
- #fault-tolerance
- DOTA_Teabag's Super Mario 64 speedrun glitch in Tick Tock Clock stunned the community.
- A cosmic ray bit flip caused Mario to warp upwards by altering a single bit in memory.
- Cosmic ray bit flips, or single-event upsets (SEUs), can change binary bits without damaging hardware.
- The 2003 Belgian election saw 4,096 extra votes due to a cosmic ray flipping a bit in voting machines.
- Bit flips are rare per bit but likely at scale; modern systems with more RAM face higher risks.
- Enterprise-grade error-correcting memory (ECC) helps mitigate bit flips, but consumer hardware lacks protection.
- NASA uses triplicate calculations for fault tolerance; ECC memory safeguards servers but has limitations.
- At scale, improbable events become inevitable, requiring resilient system designs.
- Client-side security must account for rare but possible anomalies due to high processing volumes.