Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 11:47:43 07/19/00
Go up one level in this thread
On July 19, 2000 at 13:53:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:
[snip]
>I'm not touching this. I lived about 30 miles north of a small town in
>Mississippi named "Wiggins". Why do I mention this? Because a very educated
>physicist lived there, and he made national news more than once with his
>"perpetual motion machine". Which, as we all know is a machine that at _least_
>breaks even in the energy used/energy produced. And most are trying to build
>such a gadget that more than breaks even. _and_ violates the conservation of
>matter/energy laws of physics.
>
>I don't believe it is possible to add eval at no cost. Some things might be
>addable at minimal cost, of course. But many things have a _huge_ cost if
>you want to know them.
It's probably impossible to produce perpetual motion, but the patent office
receives a huge number of such requests anyway.
I think it may be possible that Amir is right. Consider if he already has
something very expensive. Since he has to wait for that operation, he may be
able to do all the eval he wants, if he can do it in parallel.
Consider a matrix multiplication of a huge matrix. We also have to sort the
data. Now, the matrix operation is O(N^3) {or even with Strassen's
multiplication much higher than O(N^2)}. So we can sort with any slow technique
we want and it will make no practical difference in the algorithm time at all,
since the slower operation dominates.
Perhaps that is what he means. He may have some incredibly expensive operation
that is the real log jam. This slow operation means that "everything else is
free."
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