Some non floating point units of computational effort: Bitcoin POW (SHA-256 hashes/second) Other POW's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system Password cracking Most of these problems are "embarrassingly parallel". Perhaps someone here has some ideas for a non-embarrassingly-parallel unit of computational effort. At 07:16 AM 3/20/2015, James Propp wrote:

I don't know what the relevant units of computation are --- floating-point operations are the ones I've heard about most, but what if you're not using floating point? --- but I'm wondering if anyone has tried to quantify "how much computing" took place in (a) code-breaking at Bletchley Park, (b) the Manhattan Project, and (c) the Apollo space program.

It seems likely to me that my laptop, running some silly number-crunching problem in Mathematica and returning an answer after six hours that I could probably have figured out in my head if I'd thought a little bit more before jumping in to write some code, has them all beat.

What do you think?

(And while we're on the subject: What's the canonical example of wasted computational effort? Isn't there some well-known old story of someone who had an early computer calculate the determinant of a singular matrix?)

Jim Propp