Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

juxt.pro

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 213 posts

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#201

Post by dang »

password4321 wrote: post #193
thewonderidiot wrote: post #189

Mike Stewart here! I led the restoration of the AGC documented on CuriousMarc's channel and co-administrate VirtualAGC. There is a lot to unpack here. First: this is indeed a real bug in the AGC software. However, it did not go unnoticed for the whole program. It was discovered during level 3 testing of SATANCHE, and late development branch of the Command Module software COMANCHE. It was assigned anomaly number L-1D-…

The front page has moved on but this is pure gold, thanks for making the time to share all these details.

Added to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights!

(I mention this so more people can know the list exists, and hopefully email us more nominations)

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#202

Post by replwoacause »

thewonderidiot wrote: post #189

Mike Stewart here! I led the restoration of the AGC documented on CuriousMarc's channel and co-administrate VirtualAGC. There is a lot to unpack here. First: this is indeed a real bug in the AGC software. However, it did not go unnoticed for the whole program. It was discovered during level 3 testing of SATANCHE, and late development branch of the Command Module software COMANCHE. It was assigned anomaly number L-1D-…

One of the coolest replies I've ever seen on HN for sure. Thanks for taking the time to write this out!

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#203

Post by croemer »

thewonderidiot wrote: post #189

Mike Stewart here! I led the restoration of the AGC documented on CuriousMarc's channel and co-administrate VirtualAGC. There is a lot to unpack here. First: this is indeed a real bug in the AGC software. However, it did not go unnoticed for the whole program. It was discovered during level 3 testing of SATANCHE, and late development branch of the Command Module software COMANCHE. It was assigned anomaly number L-1D-…

Great comment!

The anomaly report pdf is quite long. The relevant pages for the bug report are 51 and 52: https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/contents_of_luminar...

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#205

Post by croemer »

thewonderidiot wrote: post #189

Mike Stewart here! I led the restoration of the AGC documented on CuriousMarc's channel and co-administrate VirtualAGC. There is a lot to unpack here. First: this is indeed a real bug in the AGC software. However, it did not go unnoticed for the whole program. It was discovered during level 3 testing of SATANCHE, and late development branch of the Command Module software COMANCHE. It was assigned anomaly number L-1D-…

Waiting patiently for the blog post to be edited as it's now clear it makes wrong claims starting with the subheading: "How a specification found what fifty-seven years of scrutiny missed."

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#206

Post by henrygarner »

thewonderidiot wrote: post #189

Mike Stewart here! I led the restoration of the AGC documented on CuriousMarc's channel and co-administrate VirtualAGC. There is a lot to unpack here. First: this is indeed a real bug in the AGC software. However, it did not go unnoticed for the whole program. It was discovered during level 3 testing of SATANCHE, and late development branch of the Command Module software COMANCHE. It was assigned anomaly number L-1D-…

Mike, thank you so much for such patient and thoughtful corrections. I've updated the article in response to each point you raised and added footnotes crediting you and Ron Burkey, who shared some of the same feedback via email. It's been extremely cool to learn more about the Apollo program lore in the process of pulling this all together.

Your experimental work on the voltage difference is fascinating, I appreciate you sharing the link to the demo. There's something about seeing results come off real hardware that you just don't get from computer simulation. Watching your setup brought back some of the excitement I felt driving my Makerbot via a stylus input 15 years ago (probably the last time I seriously engaged with hardware) [1]. Thanks!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNvt9PGhnds

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#207

Post by croemer »

croemer wrote: post #205
thewonderidiot wrote: post #189

Mike Stewart here! I led the restoration of the AGC documented on CuriousMarc's channel and co-administrate VirtualAGC. There is a lot to unpack here. First: this is indeed a real bug in the AGC software. However, it did not go unnoticed for the whole program. It was discovered during level 3 testing of SATANCHE, and late development branch of the Command Module software COMANCHE. It was assigned anomaly number L-1D-…

Waiting patiently for the blog post to be edited as it's now clear it makes wrong claims starting with the subheading: "How a specification found what fifty-seven years of scrutiny missed."

Update has happened

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#208

Post by bookofjoe »

mpalmer wrote: post #119
NetMageSCW wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So LLMs write effectively and when people do you accuse them of using an LLM?

No, they don't. They use short sentences in weird, stilted ways.

See also: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-ai-writing-witchhunt-is-p...

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#209

Post by zeristor »

alexjm wrote: post #186
foxyv wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having a really bad Mandala effect right now where I remember some XKCD that wrote a poem about this. Maybe I'm thinking of another comic.

Are you thinking of "The Codeless Code" poem about this? https://www.thecodelesscode.com/case/234

From the Editor’s note:

“I tried to keep to Shelley’s unusual (and non-standard) rhyme scheme for the sonnet, but I departed from it in the second-to-last line for poetic reasons. For a language which excels in stealing words from other cultures, English has an appalling lack of rhymes.”

Perhaps with deeper analysis, and a few choice new words this issue could be remedied.

Although that’s a paradoxically tedious engineering solution to improve a languages beauty.

From another angle how comes other languages are more poetic, are they older and have had more time to evolve to be more poetic? Or were the speakers who wrought the language just more poetic.

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#210

Post by zeristor »

Aurornis wrote: post #61
throwaway27448 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even clear if AI was used to find the bug: they mention modeling the software with an "ai native" language, whatever that means. What is not clear is how they found themselves modeling the gyros software of the apollo code to begin with. But, I do think their explanation of the lock acquisition and the failure scenario is quite clear and compelling.

> It's not even clear if AI was used to find the bug The intro says “We used Claude and Allium”. Allium looks like a tool they’ve built for Claude. So the article is about how they used their AI tooling and workflow to find the bug.

[dead]
Post reply on HN