Moore's Law

In 1790, Thomas Malthus noted the gathering acceleration of history. In 1909, Henry Adams said the "progression of society was fully a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800. Today we have Moore's Law which says that the power of computers doubles every 18 months. (Moore's original statement was about the number of components on an integrated chip and was made in 1965.) This doubling has been going on since the mid 1950's and most people think it will continue til at least 2015.
  1. If progress is doubling every 18 months, how long does it take for progress to go up by a factor of 10, one order of magnitude?
  2. Answer: Almost exactly 5 years (4.98 = 1.5 * log_base2 10)
  3. A cute trick is to equate 2^10 (2 to the 10th) with 10^3 (one thousand). How many years does it take to increase by the same factor as Adams' estimate of what happened during the 19th century?
  4. Answer: 15 years (15 = 1.5*10)
  5. Apple new G4 computers can do a gigaflop. One billion floating point operations per second. Working backwards, at what year do we get to human speeds, one floating point operation per minute?
  6. Answer: About 51 years, so in 1948 is the year predicted. It was also the year the transistor was invented. (51 ~ 1.5*log_base2 60*10^9)
  7. How different is computing now from what it was 15 years ago? Imagine how different it will be in 2015?
  8. Answer: We will not recognize it.
Some people assume that this acceleration will lead to a "singularity" perhaps around 2035. A Techno-rapture where the future becomes drastically unpredictable. Here are some books.

Science Fiction: Vernor Vinge Across Realtime From a review His visionary concepts of how networks and processors can give one person the ability to change the world were established before the explosion of todays technology. This book would be visionary today - and it was written in the 80's.

Science: Stephen Hawking (see page 114) A Brief History of Time From a review This is deep science; these concepts are so vast (or so tiny) as to cause vertigo while reading, and one can't help but marvel at Hawking's ability to synthesize this difficult subject for people not used to thinking about things like alternate dimensions. The journey is certainly worth taking, for, as Hawking says, the reward of understanding the universe may be a glimpse of "the mind of God."