Friday, April 19, 2013

Time to do something


A lot of times an idea strikes me.
And I realize how smarter I am becoming smarter day by day.

A lot of times I want to talk about such ideas with others.
And it is then I realize, they already know of it.

They have already been there, done that.
They know the line of thinking in and out.

And they know the value of the thoughts.
Beyond a point, the thoughts stop making much difference.

One of my favorite law from computer science is Amadahl's law.
What it states is, that if a system is made of 2 components, and you improve one of the components by a 100 %, the overall improvement is proportional to the contribution of that component only.

That is, say you were designing a computer, and you have a hard disk for read and write, (85:15 % ratio for read vs write access), and if you could somehow give enough effort to do one of the following (Say doing either requires same amount of time, manaul effort, and you have to choose to do which one first)
either take 50% the read access time (make reads 2x faster),
or take 10% write access time as earlier (make writes 10x faster),
your overall system would be more efficient by
case-1 : 100 / (85/2 + 15) = 1.74 times
case-2 : 100 / (85 + 15/2) = 1.15 times

A smaller improvement in something that impacts more give you more performance boost easily .

And beyond a point, lets say you were able to make reads faster by 1 unit for every 1 day of effort
Then
on day1     2x => 100 / (85/2   + 15) = 1.74 times
on day2     3x => 100 / (85/3   + 15) = 2.31 times
on day100 101x => 100 / (85/101 + 15) = 6.31 times
on day200 201x => 100 / (85/201 + 15) = 6.48387 times
on day201 202x => 100 / (85/202 + 15) = 6.48475 times

So yes, beyond, say a 100 days of such sustained effort, you are not going to see much improvement in the overall system if you focus on one thing alone, because something else would have become a bottleneck, no matter how insignificant it initially was.

A similar thing is there with the thoughts as well.
Beyond a point, you will get more improvement in you as a person, if you start spending more time doing stuff rather than thinking about it.

All those people, who say that first step is important, are right, it is important but only at the beginning.
Once you have crossed a threshold grey area, it won't matter whether you ever started or not, what will matter is what you are doing now, for your present and future.

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