3 ms·
I'm all for putting work to find things out and I agree with you, but for the sake of argument: Say these are really relevant 200 years down the line, maybe ev
by Levitz 5y ago
I'm all for putting work to find things out and I agree with you, but for the sake of argument:
Say these are really relevant 200 years down the line, maybe even 100 or 50, does it really make sense to calculate them now, given that computers 50, 100 and 200 years from now will outperform ours by orders of magnitude?
Looking at this as reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor_chronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor_chronology
Say you grab a CPU from the end of the 70s and get it working until now, that'd be about 13*10e15 operations, or about a month of processing in a modern 5GHz CPU. That's 40 years to a month.
- inglor_cz 5y agoMathematics tends to be upstream of technology. I would expect that improvements in mathematical knowledge in general will help us construct even better computers in the future. We are slowly approaching some physical limits, but algorithmic improvements may get us further speed improvements. IDK about this particular scientific team, but if you have to run a long-running task, you will be a lot more careful about complexity and speed of your data and algorithms instead of relying on brute force. Maybe you will actually discover some real improvements of existing knowledge. I can even see the effect throughout my IT life outside science. People who cut their teeth on processors with limited power and not enough RAM tend to produce much more efficient solutions even when programming modern computers. They just don't take the gigabytes and gigahertz for granted.