Re: [TUHS] Questions for TUHS great minds

On 17 Jan 2017 13:09 +0000, from tfb(a)tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw): I'm personally inclined to agree with Tim here. That's not to say that I don't think some of those processes could be pushed a bit farther, but as much as we would love it in some cases, a function on the form f(x)=Ca^{Dx} (for any values of C, D and a) describing something that can exist in the real world simply cannot continue forever before encountering some real-world limit. Zoom out what appears to be an exponential curve and more often than not, it turns out that what looked like an exponential curve was really the first portion of a S curve or (even worse in many cases) a portion of a parabola. Either that, or it's something like the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation or the relativistic colinear velocity addition formula, where the exponent is something you try very hard to _avoid_ the effects of for one reason or another. What could conceivably change that picture somewhat is a total paradigm shift in computing, kind of like if large general-purpose quantum computers turn out to be viable after all. But even in that case I'm pretty sure that at some point we would realize that we are on the same kind of S curve or parabola there as well, only having delayed the inevitable or shifted the origin. That's not to say that even steady-state computer power can't provide huge benefits. It absolutely can. Even the computers we have and are able to actually build today are immensely powerful both in terms of computational capability and storage, and they are, to a large degree, scalable with the proper software and algorithms. The kind of computer I have _at home_ today (which wasn't even top of the line when I put it together a few years ago) would have been considered almost unimaginably powerful just a few decades ago. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)