Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 10:38:44 04/19/05
Go up one level in this thread
On April 19, 2005 at 13:23:22, Dann Corbit wrote: >On April 19, 2005 at 04:52:12, Ricardo Gibert wrote: > >>On April 19, 2005 at 04:00:45, Uri Blass wrote: >> >>>On April 19, 2005 at 03:34:43, Drexel,Michael wrote: >>> >>>>On April 18, 2005 at 21:05:10, Dann Corbit wrote: >>>> >>>>>On April 18, 2005 at 20:50:52, Mark Ryan wrote: >>>>> >>>>>>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4449711.stm >>>>>> >>>>>>"But when Moore's Law is effectively slowed down in about 10 to 20 years' time >>>>>>..." >>>>>> >>>>>>A few years ago, Grandmaster Lev Alburt stated that chess computers would never >>>>>>be stronger than the strongest humans. If there is a practical (or asymptotic) >>>>>>limit to computer speed, maybe he was right. >>>>>> >>>>>>(Disclaimer: I realize that chess strength is not just about speed, but it is >>>>>>certainly a contributing factor.) >>>>> >>>>>In ten years time, computers will be 2^10 = 1024 times faster than today. >>>>>Right now, chess programs seem to be about as strong as the strongest humans> >>>> >>>>How fast was your PC 10 years ago? >>>>2.4 Mhz? >>> >>>more than it. >>> >>>I remember that 10 years ago P90 was available >>>and I guess that the price was similiar to the price of computers of today. >> >>According to >> >>http://cpu-museum.de/?m=Intel&f=Pentium-S+%2F+P54C#cpu0007 >> >>the P120 was introduced in 1995. This means that clock speed has roughly doubled >>every 2 years. > >Now forget about clock speed and look at what has been happening to the MIPS, >which is the only thing that really matters. > >Faster does not mean just change in clock speed. Faster means how much compute >power increases. Better scheduling, better caches, better everything is what >happens. Not just better clock rate. There is a graph on this page: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0552.html? That shows that integrated circuits are the 5th technology to yield exponential growth. Here is a quote from that page: "It's obvious what the sixth paradigm will be: computing in three dimensions. After all, we live in a three-dimensional world and our brain is organized in three dimensions. The brain uses a very inefficient type of circuitry. Neurons are very large "devices," and they're extremely slow. They use electrochemical signaling that provides only about 200 calculations per second, but the brain gets its prodigious power from parallel computing resulting from being organized in three dimensions. Three-dimensional computing technologies are beginning to emerge. There's an experimental technology at MIT's Media Lab that has 300 layers of circuitry. In recent years, there have been substantial strides in developing three-dimensional circuits that operate at the molecular level. Nanotubes, which are my favorite, are hexagonal arrays of carbon atoms that can be organized to form any type of electronic circuit. You can create the equivalent of transistors and other electrical devices. They're physically very strong, with 50 times the strength of steel. The thermal issues appear to be manageable. A one-inch cube of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful than the computing capacity of the human brain. Over the last several years, there has been a sea change in the level of confidence in building three-dimensional circuits and achieving at least the hardware capacity to emulate human intelligence. This has raised a more salient issue, namely that "Moore's Law may be true for hardware but it's not true for software." From my own four decades of experience with software development, I believe that is not the case. Software productivity is increasing very rapidly. As an example from one of my own companies, in 15 years, we went from a $5,000 speech-recognition system that recognized a thousand words poorly, without continuous speech, to a $50 product with a hundred-thousand-word vocabulary that's far more accurate. That's typical for software products. With all of the efforts in new software development tools, software productivity has also been growing exponentially, albeit with a smaller exponent than we see in hardware. Many other technologies are improving exponentially. When the genome project was started about 15 years ago, skeptics pointed out that at the rate at which we can scan the genome, it will take 10,000 years to finish the project. The mainstream view was that there would be improvements, but there was no way that the project could be completed in 15 years. But the price-performance and throughput of DNA sequencing doubled every year, and the project was completed in less than 15 years. In twelve years, we went from a cost of $10 to sequence a DNA base pair to a tenth of a cent." >>>I see no logical reason to believe that computers will be 2^10 faster in 10 >>>years. >>> >>>Maybe there is going to be a third world war and people will destroy even the >>>computers of today so computers will be slower in 2015. >>> >>>Uri
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.