

Safe Systems from Unreliable Parts - Gupie
http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Safe-Systems-from-Unreliable-Parts.html&Itemid=29

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dmlorenzetti
My boss and I found a nice example of this in some sampler-placement work we
did. The punchline is that our software occasionally doubled-up samplers in
order to increase the probability of detecting a release.

The problem domain is a biological or chemical release in a building. Given a
suite of possible release scenarios (variable release locations, amounts, and
dispersion conditions), find the sampler network with the highest probability
of detecting a release. Pretty much everything is probabilistically defined,
including how likely each scenario, and how likely a sampler is to detect a
given mass of the released substance. Critical to the discussion here, this
probability was assumed independent of what other samplers did.

The software just brute-forces its way through all possible sampler networks.
One striking result from our (very simple) study case was that it often put
two samplers in the same location. This is a clear consequence of the
principles laid out in the linked article.

For further info: Sohn and Lorenzetti, Risk Analysis, v.27 n.4 (2007),
pp.877-886.

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Sherlock
When you do this with mortages you get a financial crisis!

