[EM] Exact spatial model probabilities?

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 25.01.2022 06:06, Forest Simmons wrote:
> Thanks Ted and Daniel. Very interesting!
> 
> In the early 70's we did our minuteman missile simulations on a room
> size mainframe IBM 360/65 computer with FORTRAN code, double precision
> arithmetic ... punched cards interface.... and all. We got one
> turnaround per night.... night because the Top Secret runs had to be
> totally isolated from the daytime use of the computer. In 1974 our group
> got ahold of a couple of the mini-computers that were just coming out
> ... TTY "ticker tape" interface at first then (unreliable, but more
> convenient) floppy discs. Very slow, single precision, but interactive
> BASIC for the spine of the simulation. We employed pseudo-double
> precision for the numerical integration, and modified BASIC so we could
> call on assembled bottle-neck subroutines, etc.

It's things like these that makes me think that current computers are
capable of vastly more than they're currently being used for. Computers
with less than 1M of RAM could be used to calculate missile
trajectories, run industrial process control, etc. We now have 16G or more.

Of course, I know that part of the reason is that programmer time is now
the most scarce resource. The programs that are developed now (mostly
user-facing stuff) are much slower than they need to be in part because
it would take too much time and effort to optimize down to the bare metal.

-km