Driving below the posted speed limit is not slow. The pace of the "Fellowship of the Ring" book was not slow. A snail dragging a brick is not slow.Then what is slow, you ask, if not these things? A computer program to simulate all possible recombinations of a couple strands of DNA, is what. Specifically, the current implementation of the Recombinatron project I've previously posted about.
We've known for a while that the program was slow. There was talk of "factorial run-time" and "exponential growth" but we didn't really pay that much attention to these things. Time's too short to waste it figuring out Big O notation when you could instead just run the program.
On a computer with 12 GB of memory.
And wait eight hours as the program stalls on step 4 of 255.
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It turns out the program's pretty slow. Not "man, FancyApp 2.0 sure is slow" slow, but "man, this won't even be halfway done before the sun dies" slow.
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At least I feel better that my laptop is not painfully underpowered.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I guess that's reassuring. I take it you've seen the memory error that came up overnight?
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