From aa53f100bbf928321f29bcde239acccb3a773234 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Simon Brooke Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2021 09:54:42 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] Updated Hashing structure writ large (markdown) --- Hashing-structure-writ-large.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/Hashing-structure-writ-large.md b/Hashing-structure-writ-large.md index 5312a87..60374c5 100644 --- a/Hashing-structure-writ-large.md +++ b/Hashing-structure-writ-large.md @@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ as a query, we ought to get the value to which the first instance of `'(foo bar ## The cost of this -The cost of this, in the [post scarcity software environment](https://github.com/simon-brooke/post-scarcity) is potentially enormous: is potentially a blocker which could bring the whole project down. The post-scarcity architecture as currently conceived allows for 264 cons cells. Take the most obvious example of a wholly linear, non-branching structure, a string: it would be perverse, but possible to have a single string. +The cost of this, in the [post scarcity software environment](https://github.com/simon-brooke/post-scarcity) is potentially enormous: is potentially a blocker which could bring the whole project down. The post-scarcity architecture as currently conceived allows for 264 cons cells. Take the most obvious example of a wholly linear, non-branching structure, a string: it would be perverse, but possible to have a single string which occupied the entire address space. But to be less perverse, the text of English Wictionary is 3.9 billion words, so it's reasonable to assume that the text of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica is of the same order of magnitude. There are, on average, 4.7 characters in an English word, plus slightly more than one for punctuation, so we can round that up to six. So the string required to store the text of the Encyclopedia Brittanica would be approximately 24 billion characters long; and storing that in a string would not, in the context of the post-scarcity software environment, be utterly perverse.