Other similarly styled informational sites created by students in this course over the years can be found here: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/
RISC didn't die and CISC didn't die... "RISC vs. CISC" died instead.
...aside from being orders of magnitude more of an ass-pain if you ever have to write software that actually deals with machine code (at least on x86; perhaps other CISCs aren't as bad).
Simple example: given an instruction boundary, find the preceding instruction boundary. On most any RISC it's trivial (subtract 4, or perhaps 2 in some cases). On x86...I'm not an expert, but I'm about 80% confident it's basically impossible to do in the general case.
1. I was talking about external as in the memory hierarchy not development effort.
>(at least on x86; perhaps other CISCs aren't as bad).
This, the PDP-11 machines have a lovely instruction set for example.
I, for one, am slightly puzzled why genetic algos never became mainstream in any computational field.
Genetic programming is also a machine learning technique where you generate random answers then mix them together until it increases the fitness function. Since it knows nothing about the actual problem space, it runs very slowly yet doesn't work better than something more sensible like simulated annealing.