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BRASÍLIA – The rental of the “supercomputer” that failed in the municipal elections last Sunday, causing the results to be slow in disclosure, cost the public coffers R $ 26 million. According to the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), the problem has already been resolved and Oracle, the responsible company, has attended the Tribunal.
The flaw was caused by an artificial intelligence algorithm that ran slower than expected. The role of the algorithm, explained the TSE to GLOBO, is to adjust the performance of the machine to the demand for data processing.
This means that, through artificial intelligence, the Oracle machine learns how much of its capacity it will dedicate to a specific operation, as if it were an oven that learns to calibrate the temperature according to the food it will prepare.
This algorithm has not been trained before for the volume and speed of electoral data, as would be necessary. At a press conference on Monday, the president of the court, Luis Roberto Barroso, said that the machine arrived later than expected in August, so there was no time to do tests to calibrate the computer.
Marcel Saraiva, manager of NVIDIA Enterprise, a provider of hardware for data centers, emphasizes that artificial intelligence always works by “learning” based on a history of tests. This is what distinguishes it from other computer programs. Therefore, these algorithms are not foolproof.
– Artificial intelligence tends to solve some problems, using mathematical models, in a digital system. These tasks are usually very specific, and in them the algorithm is not correct in 100% of cases. There are limitations that are only identified when the machine is running.
In addition to compiling the results, the Oracle server received encrypted data from the Regional Electoral Courts (TRE), that is, it did not only perform the operation of “adding” tables, according to the TSE.
The price is explained, according to sources in the area, by the fact that the server is hosted within the TSE data center and not in a “cloud”, as would be usual in these cases, due to the concern for the security of maintaining the Voter data within the Brazilian Territory.
Another factor that makes the contract more expensive is that the court hired the equipment with 100% of its capacity, and not to pay only for its use.
The contracting of the Oracle service by the TSE for 48 months, without a tender, was published in the Official Gazette (DOU) in March this year. The contract also includes maintenance. Oracle employees worked with TSE on Sunday to resolve the slowness issue.
After the election, the machine is already “trained”. Therefore, the problem should not affect the second round, according to the TSE, also because the volume of data will be less.
