1 Assuming that Moore’s Law continues to hold true, where n is the number of tra
ID: 3858150 • Letter: 1
Question
1 Assuming that Moore’s Law continues to hold true, where n is the number of transistors that can currently be placed on an integrated circuit (chip), and k*n is the number that can be placed on a chip in eight years, what is the value of k?
2a) Describe how a transistor works. b) In how many different states can it be? c) How to control the resistance between the terminals of transistor? d) How can it be used to represent information?
3 For the Man, Cabbage, Goat, Wolf problem: a) List all the invalid states for this problem, that is, in which the goat is left alone with the cabbage, or the wolf is left alone with the goat. b) Give the shortest sequence of steps that solves the MCGW problem. c) Give the sequence of state representations that correspond to your solution starting with (E,E,E,E) and ending with (W,W,W,W). d) There is an alternate means of representing states. Rather than a sequence representation, a set representation can be used.
In this representation, if an item is on the east side of the river, its symbol is in the set, and if on the west side, the symbol is not in the set as shown below, {M,C,G,W}—all items on east side of river (start state) {C,W}—cabbage and wolf on east side of river, man and goat on west side { }—all items on the west side of the river (goal state) Give the sequence of states for your solution to the problem using this new state representation.
Explanation / Answer
Moore's law is the observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. The period often quoted as "18 months" is due to Intel executive David House, who predicted that period for a doubling in chip performance (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster).[1] The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper. [2][3][4] The paper noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that the trend would continue "for at least ten years".[5] His prediction has proven to be uncannily accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development. [6] The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. [7] All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well (see Other formulations and similar laws). This exponential improvement has dramatically enhanced the impact of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[8] Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.[9][10] This trend has continued for more than half a century. Sources in 2005 expected it to continue until at least 2015 or 2020.[11][12] However, the 2010 update to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors has growth slowing at the end of 2013,[13] after which time transistor counts and densities are to double only every three years.
Futurists and Moore's law Kurzweil's extension of Moore's law from integrated circuits to earlier transistors, vacuum tubes, relays and electromechanical computers. Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, and Vernor Vinge believe that the exponential improvement described by Moore's law will ultimately lead to a technological singularity: a period where progress in technology occurs almost instantly.[62] Although Kurzweil agrees that by 2019 the current strategy of ever-finer photolithography will have run its course, he speculates that this does not mean the end of Moore's law: Moore's law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to forecast accelerating price-performance ratios. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, to [Newman's] relay-based "[Heath] Robinson" machine that cracked the Lorenz cipher, to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer.[63] Kurzweil speculates that it is likely that some new type of technology (e.g. optical, quantum computers, DNA computing) will replace current integrated-circuit technology, and that Moore's Law will hold true long after 2020.[63] Seth Lloyd shows how the potential computing capacity of a kilogram of matter equals pi times energy divided by Planck's constant. Since the energy is such a large number and Planck's constant is so small, this equation generates an extremely large number: about 5.0 * 1050 operations per second.[62] He believes that the exponential growth of Moore's law will continue beyond the use of integrated circuits into technologies that will lead to the technological singularity
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