I suspect it is the very rare average HN reader who has spent any time this morning idly wondering whether a computer built out of matchboxes to play Go would be bigger or smaller than the Crab Nebula.
Really? I first came across the matchbox tic-tac-toe concept in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column as a teenager, and the first thing I did was some back-of-the-envelope calculations on how many boxes would be required for chess. If I recall, it was larger than the number of atoms in the universe.
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I suspect it is the very rare average HN reader who has spent any time this morning idly wondering whether a computer built out of matchboxes to play Go would be bigger or smaller than the Crab Nebula.
Really? I first came across the matchbox tic-tac-toe concept in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column as a teenager, and the first thing I did was some back-of-the-envelope calculations on how many boxes would be required for chess. If I recall, it was larger than the number of atoms in the universe.
Please don't tell me I'm unusual in this regard.