5 ms·

“ We don’t necessarily need faster, better hardware. We need more thoughtful, and more creative humans.” Why not both? Configurable CPUs and a upgradable runti

“ We don’t necessarily need faster, better hardware. We need more thoughtful, and more creative humans.” Why not both? Configurable CPUs and a upgradable runtime, all this we have now.

eru 6y ago
And a big point of computer is to take the need for creativity out of routine tasks. In that apocryphal story where young Carl Friedrich Gauss's class was asked by a lazy teacher to add up all the natural numbers up to 100, Gauss came up with an ingenious and creative solution. But these days, we don't need to waste the creativity of our best and brightest like that.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  My father was working on a math puzzle, and he asked me if I had any insight into it. I said that it would take me days or weeks of remembering/relearning to have any hope of solving it cleverly -- but the search space for the answers was only factorial(10) possibilities, so I could write a program to brute force it. I did. 30 minutes of code writing (of which about 20 was spent making sure I didn't miss something) and then less than 3 seconds of computing time later, I had the answer for him. Nothing clever at all -- just trying all the possibilities and seeing if that set fit.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    SMT solvers are also fun for that sort of thing.
    - eru 6y ago
      Integer linear programming solvers, too.
  - eru 6y ago
    That's sometimes fun. But I also had lots of fun solving eg the first few Project Euler challenges with some math and pen and paper. (And sometimes a desktop calculator.) Eg https://projecteuler.net/problem=2 https://projecteuler.net/problem=2 "By considering the terms in the Fibonacci sequence whose values do not exceed four million, find the sum of the even-valued terms." has a nice (almost) closed form solution that you only need a few integer multiplications and additions to evaluate.

5 ms·

“ We don’t necessarily need faster, better hardware. We need more thoughtful, and more creative humans.” Why not both? Configurable CPUs and a upgradable runti

by amiga1200 6y ago

“ We don’t necessarily need faster, better hardware. We need more thoughtful, and more creative humans.” Why not both? Configurable CPUs and a upgradable runtime, all this we have now.

eru 6y ago
And a big point of computer is to take the need for creativity out of routine tasks. In that apocryphal story where young Carl Friedrich Gauss's class was asked by a lazy teacher to add up all the natural numbers up to 100, Gauss came up with an ingenious and creative solution. But these days, we don't need to waste the creativity of our best and brightest like that.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  My father was working on a math puzzle, and he asked me if I had any insight into it. I said that it would take me days or weeks of remembering/relearning to have any hope of solving it cleverly -- but the search space for the answers was only factorial(10) possibilities, so I could write a program to brute force it. I did. 30 minutes of code writing (of which about 20 was spent making sure I didn't miss something) and then less than 3 seconds of computing time later, I had the answer for him. Nothing clever at all -- just trying all the possibilities and seeing if that set fit.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    SMT solvers are also fun for that sort of thing.
    - eru 6y ago
      Integer linear programming solvers, too.
  - eru 6y ago
    That's sometimes fun. But I also had lots of fun solving eg the first few Project Euler challenges with some math and pen and paper. (And sometimes a desktop calculator.) Eg https://projecteuler.net/problem=2 https://projecteuler.net/problem=2 "By considering the terms in the Fibonacci sequence whose values do not exceed four million, find the sum of the even-valued terms." has a nice (almost) closed form solution that you only need a few integer multiplications and additions to evaluate.