
In the 1970s it was observed for the first time a strange thing that needed some additional research to find out the cause of it: sometimes the results of the processor computing (that computing is done during all normal operations - even while you read this article there is some computing in the device you are using) are different from what they should suppose to be. Such a case, a quite important one, happened more recent during an election, when a candidate got more votes than it was possible (an additional 4096 votes).
The reason is the same: radiation coming from the exterior of the processor changed one or several bits (depending of the situation) making the result different than the expected one. In the 1970s it was about the radion from the radioactive elements generated by the nuclear power plant close to the processor factory (even a small quantity of radioactive elements that gets emebeded in the ceramic protection of the processor can produce undesired secondary effects). More recently (in the last years) it was about the cosmic radiation coming from the galaxies around us. You can find details about the phenomenon in the next presentation, but for the moment it's important to know that there are some protection measures against them.