Technical adjective/term for "you need all" vs. "you only need one"

Factual Questions
1

Hi, could use some help:

I am hunting for a particular technical term, if the term exists:

Basically, an adjective or jargon that describes the following two things:

  1. Situations or things in which you need **everything **to fall in line in order for something to happen: For instance, in order to open a combination padlock or crack a password, you need every single numerical digit to be correct. If even one digit is incorrect, it doesn’t work.

As opposed to:

  1. Situations or things in which only **one **thing needs to happen, in order for something to happen. So for instance, let’ say there are ten gunmen all coming after you, trying to kill you. You don’t need to be discovered by all ten of them in order to get killed; it only takes one of them to kill you.
    Is there an adjective to describe such things? It’s akin to how ‘a chain is only as strong as its weakest link,’ but need something more technical. Like “fail-safe” vs “fail-deadly” terminology.
2

It sounds like the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions. Each digit being right is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the safe to open, but any one assassin reaching you is a sufficient condition for you to die.

3

“All of the above” vs. “one or more of the above.”

or, more technically, “All conditions must be met” vs. “One or more the of the conditions must be met.”

4

Unanimous and unilateral are in the neighborhood but their usage is narrower than what the OP is looking for.

But within that usage, you can say something like a state of peace requires a unanimous decision to exist while a state of war can exist with a unilateral decision.

5

In a logic sense there isn’t a big difference
If you define the state differently the statements become identical
: Every Hitman misses vs. All tumbler are aligned
: One Hitman hits you vs. one tumbles is misaligned

6

I disagree, Librarian. In the study of logic, specifically using logic gates, what you have is a difference between AND and OR (sometimes written as && and ||, respectively) (also, sometimes written as multiplication and addition, respectively). A tremendous distinction.

The first example would be: Y = ABC*D, where Y describes the state of the device as open or closed. A, B, C and D are the inputs (i.e. the characters in the password).

The second example would be: Y = A+B+C+D+…, where Y describes the state of the target as alive or dead. A, B, C, … are the inputs (i.e. the hitmen being able to see, or not see, the target)

Still not sure about how useful this is, considering OP is looking for the “technical adjective/term”.

7

This is all correct, but I think The Librarian was trying to say something about how AND and OR are closely connected in a De Morgan’s Law sort of way. This is already noted by the OP: The alternative to “every single numerical digit to be correct” is “even one digit is incorrect.”

8

Right - once even one digit is wrong, it becomes the 2nd scenario: “All it takes is one digit to be wrong, for the passcode entry to not work.”
Thanks for the replies everyone. So maybe an engineer could say something like, “The obstacles are set up in unanimous configuration, so that you must crack every single one of them in order to get in?”

9

I propose conjunction and disjunction.

10

This was my thought, too.

11

Is “all or nothing” the term you are looking for? Like an electrical switch – if any contact is made, the full current flows, but without contact, there is nothing.

12

Yeah, Chronos answered the OP in the second post, but you know how this board is: all the questions the OP didn’t ask still have to be answered.

13

Redundancyfor the first. Single point of failurefor the second.

14

IFF (if and only if) each and every digit on a lock is correct, will the safe open.

15

I was thinking at first that this might involve modal operators, but that seems overkill for the OP’s types of examples.

You could phrase stuff like this with box and diamond notation, it just wouldn’t make sense to almost all people. (And I know it only since I wrote some papers on it years ago.)

16

I also thought of the distinction between parallel and series/serial, as in logic gates or Christmas tree lights.

17

These answers are mostly isomorphic to each other, but another way to think about it is that the first is a logical AND, and the second is a logical OR.

Lock_open = Correct(digit1) AND Correct(digit2) AND…

Dead = shot_by(shooter1) OR shot_by(shooter_2) OR…

18

obligate vs facultative?
any of (x,y,z) vs. all of (x,y,z)?

19

Of course, there are combinations such as, “To start the car, you must either turn the key in the ignition lock OR bypass the lock and turn the ignition switch, AND engage the starter OR pop the clutch while the car is moving, AND you must have fuel in the tank, AND the fuel pump must be working.” You could write this as S=(K+B)(S+C)FP. Another example would be “You can open the door using a key, OR by using a pick AND a tension wrench.” O=K+(PT). The tricky part is making it clear that you didn’t mean O=(K+P)*T. BTW, these work perfectly fine as mathematical formulas if you use 0 for false and any number greater than 0 for true. But I digress. The point I’m making is that merely saying necessary or sufficient, or “all of the below” vs “at least one of the below” might not be enough to describe the nuances of a complicated situation. I think AND vs OR works better.

I’ve seen the same problem arise in laws. They generally go with AND vs OR.

20

Agreed. Maybe the Critical Path concept also applies to the first.