[BRIEF NOTE] On the interstitial singularity (or "singularity")

[rfmcdonald]

Or should I say liminal? Facebook's Sanzhyk is to thank for pointing me to Steve Lohr's New York Times blog post "Software Progress Beats Moore’s Law".

A report by an independent group of science and technology advisers to the White House, published last December, cited research showing that performance gains in doing computing tasks that result from improvements in software algorithms often far outpace the gains attributable to faster processors.

The rapid improvement in chips, of course, has its own “law” — Moore’s Law, named after the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who in 1965 predicted that the density of transistors on integrated circuits would double every 18 months or so. Physics, along with ingenuity and investment, made that forecast of performance-doubling every year and a half accurate so far.

There are no such laws in software. But the White House advisory report cited research, including a study of progress over a 15-year span on a benchmark production-planning task. Over that time, the speed of completing the calculations improved by a factor of 43 million. Of the total, a factor of roughly 1,000 was attributable to faster processor speeds, according to the research by Martin Grotschel, a German scientist and mathematician. Yet a factor of 43,000 was due to improvements in the efficiency of software algorithms.

The rate of change in hardware captured by Moore’s Law, experts agree, is an extraordinary achievement. “But the ingenuity that computer scientists have put into algorithms have yielded performance improvements that make even the exponential gains of Moore’s Law look trivial,” said Edward Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington.

The rapid pace of software progress, Mr. Lazowska added, is harder to measure in algorithms performing nonnumerical tasks. But he points to the progress of recent years in artificial intelligence fields like language understanding, speech recognition and computer vision as evidence that the story of the algorithm’s ascent holds true well beyond more easily quantified benchmark tests.

This fits somewhat into my two History and Futility posts, here and here, arguing that the much mooted singularity is here and not leading into an unimaginable future at all, that the singularity is coming not through a "vertical" development of new technologies and techniques but rather through a "horizontal" exploitation of existing technologies and techniques. Using existing technologies more efficiently, organizing human societies to allow more people to fulfill their innate potential, is the thing that will see the 21st century be one of great progress.