I looked briefly into distribution of running speeds for kicks. Here is the distribution of completion times for a particular half-marathon, standard deviation is >10% of the total. Running time seems under more selection than scientific ability, but I don’t know how it interacts with training and there are weird selection effects and so on.
For reference, if you think getting from “normal person” to von Neumann is as hard as making your car go 50% faster (4 standard deviations of human running speed in that graph), you might be interested in how long successive +50% improvements of the land speed record took:
1898: 40mph
1899: 60mph
1904: 90mph
1922: 135mph
1927: 200 mph
1935: 300mph
1964: 450mph
Those numbers are way closer together than I expected, and now that the analogy appears to undermine my point it doesn’t seem like a very good analogy to me, but it was a surprising fact so I feel like I should include it.
Not actually clear what you’d make of the analogy, even if you took it seriously. You could say that IT improves ~ an order of magnitude faster than industry, and scale down the time from ~8 years to ~0.8 years to go from normal to von Neumann. But now the whole exercise is becoming a parody of itself.
(Here’s a different sample with larger standard deviation, mapping onto this sample von Neumann is more like 2x average speed.)
I looked briefly into distribution of running speeds for kicks. Here is the distribution of completion times for a particular half-marathon, standard deviation is >10% of the total. Running time seems under more selection than scientific ability, but I don’t know how it interacts with training and there are weird selection effects and so on.
For reference, if you think getting from “normal person” to von Neumann is as hard as making your car go 50% faster (4 standard deviations of human running speed in that graph), you might be interested in how long successive +50% improvements of the land speed record took:
1898: 40mph
1899: 60mph
1904: 90mph
1922: 135mph
1927: 200 mph
1935: 300mph
1964: 450mph
Those numbers are way closer together than I expected, and now that the analogy appears to undermine my point it doesn’t seem like a very good analogy to me, but it was a surprising fact so I feel like I should include it.
Not actually clear what you’d make of the analogy, even if you took it seriously. You could say that IT improves ~ an order of magnitude faster than industry, and scale down the time from ~8 years to ~0.8 years to go from normal to von Neumann. But now the whole exercise is becoming a parody of itself.
(Here’s a different sample with larger standard deviation, mapping onto this sample von Neumann is more like 2x average speed.)