Motorola engineers figured this out a few decades ago, even 99.99 to 99.999 makes a huge difference on a large scale. They even published a few interesting papers and monographs on it from what I recall.
This can be explained when thinking about what these accuracy levels mean:
99.99% accuracy is one error every 10K trials.
99.999% accuracy is one error every 100K trials.
So the 99.999% system is 10x better!
When errors are costly and you’re operating at scale, this is a huge difference.
Motorola engineers figured this out a few decades ago, even 99.99 to 99.999 makes a huge difference on a large scale. They even published a few interesting papers and monographs on it from what I recall.
This can be explained when thinking about what these accuracy levels mean: 99.99% accuracy is one error every 10K trials. 99.999% accuracy is one error every 100K trials. So the 99.999% system is 10x better! When errors are costly and you’re operating at scale, this is a huge difference.