Don Lancaster doesn't support permalinks so you have to go here and scroll down to the entry for December 21, 2006 but it is entirely worth it:
Computing power has gotten FUNDAMENTALLY INSANE.And no telling where it will lead. -- indeed... These are fun times to be alive. I'm not much into computer gaming but I am into intense graphics (photoshop, etc...) and it was the business of gaming that drove the R&D into the high-end and relativly cheap video cards we have these days.
Just realized I was sitting here solving 14 linear equations in 14 unknowns to 64 bit precision. And worrying about how I was going to speed up the algorithm to get under 120 milliseconds. And being upset that 32-bit math, while useful, was not quite good enough to do the job at hand.
That, of course, is while limping along on an ancient ( almost two years old! ) 750 MHz machine. Compared to back in college where I would spend hours with a K&E log log duplex decitrig slide rule along with the Mathematical Tables from the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics to try and solve a simple transmission line problem. To three percent accuracy.
Just about anybody now has personal computing power that is unimaginably beyond the best available to only the biggest schools or corporations a very few years ago.
Which tells us that these days, if you have a problem, throw some math at it. Another ten million calculations is simply not that big a deal anymore. Brute force reigns supreme.
And no telling where it will lead.
