Imagine any person’s DNA code as the Encyclopedia Britannica and realize that one small error in the long string of letters, just a typo, can cause a congenitally damaged heart or an illness that will ensure a brief life. Self-destruction all because of a wrong letter. Machine code isn’t much different, something that has to be somewhat concerning to us at the advent of things like driverless cars. despite their enormous promise. From “The Typo that Destroyed a NASA Rocket,” a Priceonomics post by Zachary Crockett:

“On July 22, 1962, at 9:21 AM, Mariner I was launched to great fanfare. Less than five minutes later, the mission was ‘forcefully aborted,’ $80 million went to waste, and the potentially historical flight came crashing to the ground — all because of a tiny typo in mathematical code. On its website, NASA delineates what went wrong in the moments following the launch:

‘The booster had performed satisfactorily until an unscheduled yaw-lift maneuver was detected by the range safety officer. Faulty application of the guidance commands made steering impossible and were directing the spacecraft towards a crash, possibly in the North Atlantic shipping lanes or in an inhabited area. [A range safety officer subsequently ordered its destructive abort.]’

Multiple theories emerged surrounding the reasons behind the craft’s failure, largely stemming from a bevy of reports produced in the aftermath (some official, and others merely speculation). But the most commonly cited explanation, directly from Mariner I’s Post-Flight Review Board, is that a lone ‘dropped hyphen or overbar’ in the computer code instructions incited the flight’s demise.

Five days after the ill-fated launch, a New York Times headline harped on the minuscule typo — ‘For Want of Hyphen, Venus Rocket is Lost’ — and the paper’s story reported that the error had been the result of ‘the omission of a hyphen in some mathematical data.’ Purportedly, a programmer at NASA had left out the symbol while entering a “mass of coded information” into the computer system.”