. What's a good guess as to how fast computers will be by 2010? How might such a thing be estimated?
A. In 1965, Intel founder Gordon E. Moore predicted technological advances would allow computer chips to double in power roughly every two years, and this has held fairly true--called "Moore's Law," say Jeffrey Bennett and William Briggs in "Using and Understanding Mathematics: A Quantitative Reasoning Approach."
Doubling means exponential growth, as computer speeds went from about 1 to 100 calculations/second between 1950 to 1960, then from about 100 million to 10 billion calculations/second between 1990 and 2000. Extrapolating from this, with rates leaping a hundredfold per decade, we can all look for computers to do a breakneck trillion calculations/second by 2010!
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