Hacker News Reader

I thought you were going to go the other direction with your first sentence. It took some 4 billion years to go from the first cell to the first homosapien. Maybe another 400,000 years to get from that to how we are today.

That means 0.01% of the timeline was all it took for us to differentiate ourselves from regular animals who aren't a threat to the planet.

0.01% of 100 years is 3 days.

View on HN

That's a very anthropocentric view, and not how the timeline works. Unicellular organisms are also smart in a way computers can't exactly replicate. They hunt, eat, sense their environment, reproduce when convenient, etc. All of these are also intelligent behaviours.

And just 4 hours for AlphaZero to teach itself chess, and beat every human and computer program ever created....

DNA sequencing went from $3b per genome to $600, in about 30 years, much, much faster than Moore's "law".

Why do you say "much, much faster"? $600 to $3 billion is about the same as going 2^9 (512) to 2^32 (4.3B), which requires 23 doublings. Moore's law initially[1] specified a doubling every year (30 years would be 30 doublings), then was revised to every two years (15 doublings), but is often interpreted as doubling every 18 months (20 doublings). Seems pretty close to me!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Reply on news.ycombinator.com