In 1987 a radiation therapy machine killed and mutilated patients due to an unknown race condition in a multi-threaded program.

25    02 Sep 2015 18:34 by u/zulban

4 comments

4 u/Mytheral 02 Sep 2015 19:50

Before anyone likens a "race condition" to what happened with some facial recognition and white balancing software...

A race condition is an undesirable situation that occurs when a device or system attempts to perform two or more operations at the same time, but because of the nature of the device or system, the operations must be done in the proper sequence to be done correctly.

Edit: Also you may wish to check out some of the more famous conversion errors... Including two that NASA made that were a year apart.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/25845/quick-6-six-unit-conversion-disasters

0 u/acceleraptor 03 Sep 2015 03:45

All that caused by incrementing a flag variable instead of setting it. Wow.