On the way to perfect computing

Browsing the web met an interesting resource – Peter Norvig’s aritcle (Peter is Research Director at Googe).

It looks like he gives obvious directions, sometimes funny, but formed in a good way. Yeah, 10 years is a time frame that makes developer a mature one…

Snippets:

1. “the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve.”
2. “the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors.”

Everybody should be awared of:

Approximate timing for various operations on a typical 1GHz PC in summer 2001:

execute single instruction 1 nsec = (1/1,000,000,000) sec

fetch word from L1 cache memory 2 nsec

fetch word from main memory 10 nsec

fetch word from consecutive disk location 200 nsec

fetch word from new disk location (seek) 8,000,000nsec = 8msec

Source