On Wed, 13 Mar 1996, der Mouse wrote:

T*[7] contains 192153 elements. This is right on the bare edge
(maybe past the bare edge) of what could be handled on most machines.

Two hundred thousand elements is on the edge? Even assuming an
extremely noncompact representation of 20 bytes each (one per
non-center cubie), that's only four megabytes. The _smallest_ RAM load
I have at home (never mind the machines I have access to at work) is 8
megs, and one machine has 28. Keeping such a list entirely in-core
would be no problem at all. Nowhere near the edge.

But Jerry Bryan knows what he's talking about too well to make this
simple a blunder. Could some kind soul explain what I've obviously
missed?

Well, I would argue whether I know what I'm talking about when it comes
to marrying Shamir with M-conjugacy. I'm just sort of thinking out loud
right now, not implementing any code.

But at one point, Bob Moews reported that his implementation of Shamir
required 104 bytes per position. Of the 104 bytes, 48 bytes were the
position itself. The rest of the bytes were queues, pointers, and various
overhead of that sort. I've been guessing that to keep up with all the
pointers and so forth required for M-conjugacy, it might take 200 bytes or
so per position. But assume optimistically that it could be compressed
down to 100 bytes per position. Then, we are up to about 20 meg for
T*[7], and about 180 meg for T*[8]. I really think that's a bit too
optimistic, but it's probably not too far off. But if this guess is off
by even a factor of two, then you would need 40 meg for T*[7].

On the other hand, assume these memory estimates are approximately
correct. At some point, the constraint will become time rather than
memory. Even on a very fast machine, it might take dozens of years rather
than hundreds of hours to calculate something like T[14] or T[16] as
(T*[7] x T*[7]) or as (T*[8] x T*[8]).

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Robert G. Bryan (Jerry Bryan)                jbryan@pstcc.cc.tn.us
Pellissippi State                            (423) 539-7127
10915 Hardin Valley Road                     (423) 694-6435 (fax)
P.O. Box 22990
Knoxville, TN 37933-0990