Progress in Algorithms Beats Moore’s Law

Title should be: Progress in Some Algorithms Beats Moore's law

which is not surprising

Perhaps Moore's law is a consequence of people's ability to design algorithms. Hardware design needs similar resources and concepts: circuit routing, simulations, benchmarking, design re-use, code bases ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language )...

Some discussion earlier today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2038726

Why is this surprising?

First of all, Moore's Law isn't a law at all, it's a prediction. It's not some universal constraint.

Second, it's a self fulfilling prophecy, which explains why the prediction has been pretty darn good so far:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#As_a_target_for_i...

This is a gratifying idea to think about. It implies that the "underoptimized software" woes are not really a problem of increased hardware causing laziness - they're a result of combined hardware and algorithm developments making problems _possible_ to solve that previously would have been too hard. That they could be solved with tighter code is ultimately less important.

I'm basically going to abuse this article to make the claim Computer Science > Computer Engineering (by a factor of 43!).

Self driving cars offer, perhaps, a counter example:

It was a fundamental problem. In the mid-'90s, microchips weren't fast enough to process all the potential options, especially not at 55 miles per hour. In 1996, Dickmanns proclaimed that real-world autonomous driving could "only be realized with the increase in computer performance … With Moore's law still valid, this means a time period of more than one decade." He was right, and everyone knew it. Research funding dried up, programs shut down, and autonomous driving receded back to the future.

from:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/stanley.html?pg=2&#...