In order to do error-correcting computation, you also need a way to prevent errors from accumulating over many serial manipulations. The simplest way to do this is again to use redundancy: break the computation into multiple parts, perform each part multiple times on different pieces of hardware, and use the most common output from one part as input to the next part. [Fn: Of course, the operation that finds the most common output can itself suffer errors, but the procedure can be done in a way such that this is unlikely to happen for a large fraction of the hardware units.]
I’ve forgotten the details about how this was supposed to be done, but they should be in the two papers I linked.
When I wrote about AGI and lock-in I looked into error-correcting computation a bit. I liked the papers von Neumann, 1952 and Pippenger, 1990.
Apparently at the time I wrote:
I’ve forgotten the details about how this was supposed to be done, but they should be in the two papers I linked.