On Friday, 8 February 2013 at 21:07:58 UTC, Era Scarecrow wrote:
On Friday, 8 February 2013 at 12:27:50 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
On Friday, 8 February 2013 at 06:59:20 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
So right now we can handle 20! = 2,432,902,008,176,640,000
permutations. If every check took only 20 clock cycles of a 4
Ghz CPU, it would take you ~386 years to go through the list.
For the average human researcher this is plenty of time.
On a modern supercomputer this would take well under 2 months.
(I calculated it as ~44 days on Minerva at Warwick, UK). 19!
would take less than 3 days.
In a parallel setting, such large numbers are assailable.
If we have such a large number of computations, then either
cent will have to be implemented, use BigInt, or an internal
array that handles locational information. That would remove
the limitations of 20 to either 255, or 65535 (assuming you
EVER need that many). Course rummaging through the array for
the next computation becomes more difficult the larger the
number of elements.
Seeing as 61! is of the order of the number of atoms in the
observable universe, i don't think there's much need to plan for
any higher than that!
