The brutal math of compounding errors

Why focus so intensely on 99%? Why not settle for 95%, or even 90%?

Because the math gets unforgiving quickly. At 90% per-step accuracy, a 10-step task succeeds only 35% of the time (0.9^10 ≈ 0.35). At 99%, those same 10 steps succeed 90% of the time – the difference between “sometimes works” and “mostly works.”... See more