Friday, March 04, 2011

[kgfhqmwg] Expressing computational difficulty as factorials

For ease of understanding, express the computational effort of task in terms of the largest factorial (n!) one can compute in the same amount of computation time.  This gives a nice round number, exponentially scaled to keep up with Moore's Law.

It's not the best way; computation of factorial depends on the algorithm, amount of memory available.  It's a very rough order of magnitude comparison.

Inspired by Watson; just how much computation does Watson do per question?  Of course it's all parallelized.

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