[r-t] Big search

[Don Morrison]

Ben Willetts wrote:
> Mark's figure above is compositions found and proved per second, not nodes 
> visited.

Thinking about this further, I've confused myself again. What does it mean to 
"find" a composition? With c. 450 billion of them you surely can't be writing 
them out to a file or anything. If we conservatively estimate 50 bytes per 
composition, that would still be be over 20 terabytes.

Come to think of it, is "billion" in this context 10^9? Or in the UK does 
"billion" instead mean 10^12? In which case that would be over 20 petabytes!





-- 
Don Morrison <dfm at ringing.org>
"Sumerology is a tightly-knit, somewhat secretive academic discipline,
which does not make it easy for the outsider to form a clear view of
the current state of knowledge in the field."
                                  -- Geoffrey Sampson, _Writing Systems_