help - reference on "practical" computational limits!

Bruce Edmonds (B.Edmonds@MMU.AC.UK)
Fri, 8 Dec 1995 15:50:42 GMT

There is a paper (and I am pretty sure it was also summarised in a
Scientific American article) which makes an estimate of the maximum
number of bits that could be processed by the universe given a
quantum limit on the amount of bits per mass per time, and guesses as
to the total mass and time left in our universe.

The answer was quite large (of the order of 10^300, I seem to recall),
but still small compared to an exhaustive search of a game like Go
(with 10^800 possible games) or other combinatronic problems.

Can anyone help with this reference? I have searched everywhere in
my databases. Thanks.

----------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Edmonds
Centre for Policy Modelling,
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