Exponentials and the Virus
When we heard the reports of a novel virus emerging from China, it had become clear to many of us that it was growing exponentially and would soon spread across the globe. Initially called nCov-19 or novel coronavirus 2019, the virus was renamed SARS-CoV-
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When we heard the reports of a novel virus emerging from China, it had become clear to many of us that it was growing exponentially and would soon spread across the globe. Initially called nCov-19 or novel coronavirus 2019, the virus was renamed SARS-CoV-2 when analysis showed that it was closely related to the coronavirus that led to the SARS epidemic of 2003. “We” in this case refers to a group of doctors, scientists, and business leaders. Several members are epidemic experts having dedicated a significant portion of their lives to the tracking, prediction, and study of contagions. Others in the group have been analyzing exponential phenomena of many types including biological, digital and other trends that quickly increase in orders of magnitude. All of us recognized that it has historically been very difficult to effectively communicate the magnitude of exponentially-driven trends. Let’s consider a few such trends and then return to the virus. Moore’s law is an exponential trend that has now permeated our culture. In 1965, Gordon Moore noted that the number of transistors on a chip typically doubles every two years while the cost of the chip halves in the same period. He later revised the time period to every 18 months. It turns out that not only has Moore’s law been fairly reliable since 1965, we can trace an exponential trend in computing from as early at 1910 (see Fig. 1). Yet, despite the grand success of Moore’s law, it has still been very challenging in the last 50 years to communicate the changes that would come about due to exponential phenomenon. There was still skepticism in the 1980s that computers would become household staples. Experts failed to appreciate that plunging costs
Author, Quantum Computing: An Applied Approach J. D. Hidary Palo Alto, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Wonders (ed.) Math in the Time of Corona, Mathematics Online First Collections, https://doi.org/10.1007/16618_2020_7
J. D. Hidary
Fig. 1 Exponential trends in computing power. (Source: Kurzweil.net with permission)
and rising capabilities would make computing ubiquitous not only in the home but in mobile phones and in wristwatches. Even today, many experts do not fully appreciate that inexpensive and powerful computing will continue to transform many industries. For example, a recently developed blood pressure cuff has its own chip and SIM card on board and has no need to be paired with a mobile phone. This biomarker device, and others like it with such computing capabilities, is enabling a new paradigm of healthcare. The human mind has evolved to be more attuned to short-term perturbations such as the rustle in the leaves that could signal a tiger or other danger. Even as our species turned to agriculture, we understood the seasons that drive the planting and harvesting of our crops and which repeat each year; they may fluctuate a bit year to year, but that generally stay within a comprehensible range. There is a wonderful fable from the 13t
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