by chrisss395 4 hours ago
How did the voting work? The first thing I thought was, what happens in a tie (2-2) vote?
It's unlikely that you'd get a simultaneous tie; you'd expect one computer to go bad before the other. But I think in that case, the astronauts switch to the Backup Flight System, the fifth computer.
Mission STS-9 had two computer failures, causing landing to be delayed by 7 3/4 hours. They carried a sixth computer as a backup for following missions.
As far as how the voting works, each computer has a signal indicating what it thinks the status is of each computer, including itself. (Computers can detect many failures from self-checking, such as parity errors.) Each IOP uses these votes to determine the "redundant set", calculating the votes in hardware. The status is also displayed to the astronauts in a 5×5 grid. Astronauts can power down a computer or reboot it.
Favorite story I heard about voting was an anecdote relating to the flight computers on one of the Boing 7xx jets (probably the 757, but I don't know).
The story was that they were planning to fly with 3 computers, and that they would "vote" on important decisions.
The real trick was that they intended to build those computer with 3 separate teams, using clean room implementation (no coordinating with the other teams), and that they were going to use 3 separate CPU architectures, and even 3 different implementation languages.
As I understand it, they conceded on the language choice, they were all going to use the same language, but I don't know about the rest.
The goal was to avoid some catastrophic "unknown unknown" that might have crept into the implementation if they simply rolled out 3 copies of the same system.