On 27/11/2014 23:17, Matt Mahoney via AGI wrote:
I am intimately familiar with the process of developing data compression software. It is an iterative process. You think you have a good idea of what changes ought to improve compression. But then you do the experiment and you are right maybe less than half of the time. Even if you are a fast coder, you can see that development time is limited by the CPU power available to do the tests and gain a couple bits of knowledge.
It sounds unlikely to me. Most software companies spend an order of magnitude more on human resources than they do on computational capacity. In the case of compression, there are many possible changes which could be tested in parallel - and then the useful ones combined to form the basis of the next generation of the product. Even if the process has an exceptionally slow build-test cycle, that doesn't stop the project from developing in parallel - and absorbing human resources in the form of programmers, testers, trainers, management, sales and marketing. Indeed, the technical side of general-purpose data compression development is fairly easy to parallelise - due to all the different sorts of data that need to be compressed. Computers are pretty cheap these days. I think that it is rare for the machines to be a serious bottleneck. -- __________ |im |yler http://timtyler.org/ [email protected] Remove lock to reply. ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
