4 ms·
This is awesome. Also I found a tiny nitpick "But the early 1990s also brought a big breakthrough in an algorithm, known as symplectic integration, that reduce
by everyone 9y ago
This is awesome. Also I found a tiny nitpick
"But the early 1990s also brought a big breakthrough in an algorithm, known as symplectic integration, that reduced computational times by an order of magnitude."
then
"Because symplectic integrators don’t waste time rediscovering Kepler’s laws over and over, they run orbital simulations hundreds of times as fast as older methods do."
100 times as fast is two orders of magnitude.
- ryanx435 9y agoMaybe,maybe not. Depends on what base you are measuring magnitude in. In base 10, 100x is 2 orders of magnitude. In base 2, the same speed up (written in binary: 1100100x) is between 6 and 7 orders of magnitude.
- Armisael16 9y agoNo one means any base other than base 10 when they use that phrase in casual speech (without previously saying so).