Computers: It's Time to Start Over

Computers: It's Time to Start Over:

That’s a great question. I mean it is an interesting problem. You know, the market is controlled by what people are willing to pay for a product. And one of the things we know about the computer industry is that it’s very driven by this concept of “time to market.” You want to get things to the consumer as soon as possible. You don’t do everything 100 percent right. You do it 90 percent right or 70 percent right, because you can always issue updates later, or once you’re doing a bit better in the marketplace, replace the parts, and your second-generation users will expect something a little bit better than what we call early adopters, who are willing to take risks as they adopt technology. So there’s a cycle there that means that we’re willing to put things out that aren’t quite ready. So when we look at algorithms to search for desired values in some large space—and we ha...

Full article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/computing/software/compu...