A coworker has a thing for 3D puzzles. Friday, while taking a break from real coding, I decided to write a program to solve one of his 3D cube puzzles. It's one where you have 10 or so Tetris-style pieces that fit together to form a cube. It's a neat problem because if you don't prune the tree well enough, the number of potential moves is huge (on the order of 10^20). My program is not particularly well-written code but it does work and solves the puzzle in about 20 seconds on my old 1.4ghz Tbird. On a whim, I looked at how many combinations it had to try. 266 million.
The program dutifully examined 266 million possible moves before arriving at the solution 20 seconds later. Amazing. And my machine is pushing 4-5 years old. A modern Athlon or P4 could have done it in 7-8 seconds. By comparison, I figure it would have taken 45 days of runtime on my old Commodore 64.
We sometimes don't realize the amount of computing power we have available to us in our own homes.
The program dutifully examined 266 million possible moves before arriving at the solution 20 seconds later. Amazing. And my machine is pushing 4-5 years old. A modern Athlon or P4 could have done it in 7-8 seconds. By comparison, I figure it would have taken 45 days of runtime on my old Commodore 64.
We sometimes don't realize the amount of computing power we have available to us in our own homes.
