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PARTISAN REVIEW
brain. And just in the past year tremendous progress was made in that
area. You'll notice, also, that it's not a straight line. A straight line in an
exponential chart represents exponential growth, and you'll notice that we
actually have exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth.
It
took
us three years to double the price/performance of computing at the begin–
ning of the twentieth century, two years in the middle. We're now doubling
the price / performance of computing every year.
Now, in the interest of time I'm going to show you, very quickly, just
how pervasive this phenomenon of exponential growth and particularly
information-based technologies is, not just in computers, but in biological
technology. The Human Genome Project was not a mainstream project
fifteen years ago. Mainstream critics said, "There's no way you'll be able
to sequence the genome in fifteen years. We just spent a year, and we're
only able to sequence one ten-thousandth of the genome. How are we
going to finish in fifteen years? Okay, it'll speed up a bit, but not enough ."
But, indeed, we've doubled the price / performance of base-pair sequenc–
ing every year, from twelve dollars per base pair in
1990
to a penny in
2000.
It's now about a tenth of a cent, enabling most of the project to be
finished in the last year of the project. Magnetic data storage is another
example-that's not Moore's Law, that's a different phenomenon.
EXPONENTIAL
SCALE(SJ
Years Ago
