"Charles B. Owen - Matrix Error" - читать интересную книгу автора (Owen Charles B)

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MATRIX ERROR
"That's the way the system works.
by Charles B. Owen Sometimes you get in and you
don't come out."
Copyright (c) 1993



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"I tell you, Doc, the tix rate's up."

Dr. Walter Donly reached for his keyboard and hit the system statistics hot key. Just inside his office door the husky service technician stood shifting his weight from foot to foot. "I appreciate your concern, John," Walt said as the screen filled with data, "but you know as well as I do that the matrix error rate is determined by laws of physics. It doesn't change." He gestured at the screen. "Last month's error rate was one in 188,000. That's close enough to the mean for me."

John Beach still looked skeptical. Walt sighed and wondered if they would ever understand. Running two matrix error service calls in a single day always convinced the techs that system parameters had changed--or had been changed. John had been in before, for the same reason, as had most of the techs. Walt wondered what incident had brought this on.

"I can call stats, too," John said. "But that doesn't explain sites that tix twice in a week. What are the odds on that?"

"That's statistics. You throw five dice, sometimes you get Yatzee. The chance may be small, but it happens."

"Twice in a month?" John asked.

"For a single site?"

"Yeah."

In his entire service apprenticeship, Walt had never seen a site tix twice in a single week. In a morbid fashion he was jealous. "Sounds like you hit the lottery," he said.

"Some, lottery, Doc. What are the odds, anyway?"

Walt sighed. John was going to be tedious. But he was curious, too. "Let's see," he said, clearing the screen and summoning a statistics calculator on the office computer. John moved into the office and sat down.

"OK, pods average thirty uses a day," he began. He was entering equations as he spoke. "The nominal error rate is one in 189,788. So the chance of an error on any particular day is..." He hit the calculate key. "...one in 6,387."

"See what I mean," John said.

"Now hold on. Divide that by seven, and the chance of an error in a week drops to one in 912."

"That's still pretty high."

"Not when you account for volume. With half a billion pods out there, one in 912 is nothing."

"I know there's a lot of pods. But what's the chance of two errors in a week?"

"Simple. 912 raised to the second power." He pressed the keys.

"831,744," John announced. "Good God. You're not going to tell me that's normal."