Principle Stash

Comic

Two panels. Left: an input of 1 feeds three identical gates drawn as small robots; two output 1, the middle one, dizzy, outputs 0. A majority organ takes two of three and outputs 1. Caption: one broken gate, right answer anyway, only if the gates fail at different times. Right: a bundle of ten wires carrying one bit with three flipped passes through a shuffle box labelled U, then a restoring organ that votes in threes. Seventy percent of the wires are right going in, about seventy-eight percent coming out, then eighty-eight and ninety-six on further passes.

The Majority Organ

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Democracy, but for vacuum tubes.

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Appears in Reliable Machines From Unreliable Parts

Transcript

Triplicate and vote. An input of 1 feeds three robot gates. The top and bottom ones output 1; the middle one, seeing stars, outputs 0. A majority organ takes “2 of 3” and outputs 1. “One broken gate, right answer anyway. (Only if the gates fail at different times.)”

Multiplex and restore. A bundle of ten wires, three of them flipped, “70% right”, runs through a shuffle box labelled U and into a restoring organ that “votes in threes”. Out come two flipped wires: “78% right”. Further passes: 70% → 78% → 88% → 96%.