computational efficiency Quotes

As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid, the question will then arise — by what course of calculation can these results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?

A state-of-the-art calculation requires 100 hours of CPU time on the state-of-the-art computer, independent of the decade.

The difference between us and a computer is that, the computer is blindingly stupid, but it is capable of being stupid many, many million times a second.

The object of the engine is in fact to give the utmost practical efficiency to the resources of numerical interpretations of the higher science of analysis, while it uses the processes and combinations of this latter.

No one knows what the right algorithm is, but it gives us hope that if we can discover some crude approximation of whatever this algorithm is and implement it on a computer, that can help us make a lot of progress.

The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand - and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.

The idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast, the kernel, is inherently counter productive.

AI will be critical in the race for innovation power, lying behind countless future developments in drug discovery, gene therapy, material science, and clean energy—and in AI itself. Faster airplanes did not help build faster airplanes, but faster computers will help build faster computers. 

The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer.

The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all.

A computer can have so much more in its brain that a human can.

Machines already are much smarter than us at so many things. I mean, try to multiply two 10-digit numbers with each other or, you know, sift through a thousand documents. So there's lots of things that machines are better at including in mental task than us. There's many more that they're not as good at, but the direction is pretty obvious and the progress is clear.

Keep computations to the lowest level of the multiplication table.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.