Pete's Log: Pete's Number Updates
Entry #1989, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff, Random Crap, Starcraft)(posted when I was 43 years old.)
Played some StarCraft with Branden and Brian this morning. It was excellent fun as usual, although we had a tough time when we included a very hard AI in our opponents.
After concluding, Branden and I never hung up the voice chat and after some time found ourselves down a rabbit hole discussing Pete's Number and how it had gone from taking 4 hours to compute in 1997 to 5 seconds now. I remembered Brian had sent me a data point roughly a decade ago, but apparently I never recorded that data point on the PN page or in my log. But luckily I was able to find the email. In July 2012, according to Brian, Pete's Number took "less than 2 minutes" to compute. So that's an entertaining trajectory to see.
Branden took some time running PN tests on his laptop. The PN page has been updated to reflect all these data points. Curious to see when we see a sub-second PN calculation on consumer hardware.