> From: Don Dailey <[email protected]>
>
> On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 14:22 -0800, terry mcintyre wrote:
> > In my experience with IT systems administration, people do tend to let
> > the hardware do the heavy lifting when algorithmic improvements could
> > double and quadruple the performance. We don't know much about the
> > space of useful algorithms; if we focus on some particular algorithm,
> > we may only be able to wring a few percent out of it, where some
> > better algorithm could possibly yield 50% or 75% reduction in run
> > time. We are looking for higher peaks on a mountain range enshrouded
> > by a heavy fog of uncertainty.
>
> That may be true of IT system administrators, but game developers
> writing extremely high performance game playing programs like Go and
> Chess don't think like that at all. They do not blow off even minor
> performance improvements. They salivate when new hardware comes out,
> and it's not because they can switch over to slower algorithms or use
> higher level languages. To these kind of people that would be like
> buying a brand new Lamborghini for driving to the grocery store.
A more apt analogy might be driving that brand new Lamborghini the long and
twisty way around the country, instead of using a more direct route, given that
you don't have an accurate map. You're going faster, but not getting as much
speedup as possible. We're a long way from knowing the best possible algorithms
to solve this problem. We may even need to make radical revisions to take
advantage of totally different architectures. If, for example, large-scale
memristor networks are developed, we might find that they can do an amazing
amount of work compared to von Neumann architectures. We might stop thinking of
"CPUs" and "memory" as separate entities.
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