> can't two errors cancel each other out and you still wind up at zero?
They can, but the probability of two opposite errors of exactly the same magnitude is much lower than of any individual random error.
It's the same as with any other error-correction encoding. You don't have a guarantee that all errors will be caught by it, but most of them can be, so it's useful overall.
alt Hacker News
> can't two errors cancel each other out and you still wind up at zero?
They can, but the probability of two opposite errors of exactly the same magnitude is much lower than of any individual random error.
It's the same as with any other error-correction encoding. You don't have a guarantee that all errors will be caught by it, but most of them can be, so it's useful overall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_correction_code