Wampum

Engage the bouncing ball

View A

I had the pleasure of working at the Open Software Foundation Research Institute for the last years of its existence, before mismanagement and the general decline of fortunes of computing enterprises as both the Cold War money ebbed away from supercomputing, and from general purpose computing, and the commercial market collapsed into persistent monopoly.

One of the projects there was a hard-realtime problem -- a contraption fed a couple of colored golf balls to a drop tube a couple of feet long, and while a ball fell, but before it hit, a trio of computers had to sense the color of the ball-in-drop and agree (vote) on the sensed color, with one computer selected at random to lie or abstain or simply malfunction. The computers communicated over an ordinary Ethernet, with the network protocol stack being slightly non-standard (supporting the low-latency distributed shared-state "votes" model).

The application was a gun pointer. The ball an inbound anti-ship missile, the time the ball fell the effective engagement time of a 20mm Gatling gun (effective closing rate and closing mount turn rate), the set of agreed voters the fire-control computers, and the wacky computer(s) those inevitably on the blink, or rendered inoperable, along with any associated persons, by a prior unsuccessful attempts to engage the bouncing ball.

The loss of the Sovs sort of put a damper on anti-ship missile defense, unless you think that commodity anti-ship missiles are the poor state's answer to Sea Power, what shoulder fired rockets are to neighborhoods troubled by intrusive hummers and helicopters, and IEDs are to gated communities troubled by persistent boundary crossing main battle tanks. Of course, symmetric forces engagements aren't impossible in the near future either.

View B

Today's Al Jazeera has a story on a trio who put a sensor (a laser scanner) inside a commodity communications device (a mobile phone) and sent data to a remote computer. The scanner determined the position of a roulette wheel when a ball was released by the croupier, and identified where it fell and measured the declining orbit of the wheel. This data was transmitted to the remote node which calculated the six adjacent positions on the roulette wheel where the ball was most likely to land. This range information was then transmitted back to the communications device and flashed on to the screen of the mobile just before the wheel made its third spin, by which time all bets must be placed.

Having reduced their odds of winning from 37-1 to 6-1, the trio placed bets on all six numbers in the section where the ball would definitely end up. On the first night they won more than $180,000, returning the next night to win $2 million.

When you read MB's prior piece on the transformation of sectors of the economy under the regimes of Reagan and Bush, the bit about the DoD R&D budget isn't esoteric. There are lots of hard-real-time problems that redundant distributed voting systems could be applied to, but when militarism controls the national R&D budget, and it has since Dwight Eisenhower's time, gun pointers come first, and the dual-use is awarded via non-competitive procurements and abusive patent and licensing laws to an equivalent institutional point of monopoly control.

Posted by EBW at December 8, 2004 08:40 AM | TrackBack