moore's law..

Moore's law describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware not about human beings or their innate intellect.
This law was and is a function of how many transistors ...then ICs...then logic gates you could squeeze on a topography of a circuit board.

Gordon Moore was co-founder of Intel.

but is there anything on how fast humans "computing power" is expanding?


i mean think of it, we today have the knowldge of everyone before us for like thousands and thousands of years. standing on the shoulders of giants heh.


doesnt that exponentially increase our knowledge we are capable of aquiring?

we have so much less to sort through.

Basically Moore's law states that the number of transistors you can cram into a given space will double every 18 months, that is, until you start reaching physical limits where you just can't make anything smaller (i.e. the atomic level).

Legend has it that Intel was created by a drawing of a processor, on a napkin, at the Wagonwheel restaurant on Middlefield Road, in Mountain View, CA. Moore worked at Fairchild at the time. The Fairchild site became a superfund cleanup site, and eventually became the Veritas headquarters, now owned by Symantec.

No.

If your car has 400 hp..does that change your own innate ability to run? The computer and it's ability to crunch numbers faster is merely a tool. Man's mind is not any more able to think faster or better with acquiring this tool. In fact, with all of the distraction, it could be more ADD- or ADHD-prone..but that's a whole other matter.

I think you may have found a acorn here---when was the last time you used long division, extracted a square root by hand, or considered a logarithm. Since the advent of hand held computers old algorithms are quickly becoming lost. One may argue that this has been a release, but many of my younger contemporys (I'm an chemical/nuclear engineer) give me blank looks when I attempt to simplify arithmetic to ease computation (I argue that it reduces machine error even though it eases hand checks of computer calculations).

Sometimes it is interesting to look at precomputer checking algorithms---I remember 'casting 9s', a technique my granddad used to check long lists of additions---

You must remember that knowledge is a cascades and that sometimes you must remember that the only reason you can do what you're doing is because of the shoulders you're standing on.

BTW Moores law is not strictly a scientific law---it is a computer economic guideline---similar to and possibly expounding the one discovered by Henry Ford when he found when he doubled his production rate on an assembly line, the unit cost dropped by 40%.

Rap

... all are good points, rap. I'm of the era of slide rules..on my last exam ('70's) I used a slide rule to compute my work...even though the scientific calculator was in vogue.

Try this approach Ogi

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

rap wrote-



I think, rap, that if you dig a little deeper, you will find that some of the ladies in Homer's day, possibly even earlier, were very well aware of the guideline you refer to most of whom would probably have considered 40% a bad day at the office.