Where do you even put the 10^100 objects you’re iterating through? What made you pick 10^100 as the scale of difficulty? I mean, even though you’ve ignored parallelism and the sheer number of processing pipelines available to simultaneously handle things, that’s only a dozen orders of magnitude, not 100. Exponents go up fast.
So, to answer your title, “no, I cannot”. Fortunately, I CAN abstract and model that many objects, if they’re similar in most of the ways that matter to me. The earth, for instance, has about 10^50 atoms (note: that’s not half the size of your example, it’s 1/10^50 the size). And I can make a fair number of predictions about it. And there’s a LOT of behavior I can’t.
Yes, abstraction is the right thing to think about. That is the context in which I was considering this computation. In this post I describe a sort of planning abstraction that you can do if you have an extremely regular environment. It does not yet talk about how to store this environment, but you are right that this can of course also be done similarly efficiently.
Where do you even put the 10^100 objects you’re iterating through? What made you pick 10^100 as the scale of difficulty? I mean, even though you’ve ignored parallelism and the sheer number of processing pipelines available to simultaneously handle things, that’s only a dozen orders of magnitude, not 100. Exponents go up fast.
So, to answer your title, “no, I cannot”. Fortunately, I CAN abstract and model that many objects, if they’re similar in most of the ways that matter to me. The earth, for instance, has about 10^50 atoms (note: that’s not half the size of your example, it’s 1/10^50 the size). And I can make a fair number of predictions about it. And there’s a LOT of behavior I can’t.
Yes, abstraction is the right thing to think about. That is the context in which I was considering this computation. In this post I describe a sort of planning abstraction that you can do if you have an extremely regular environment. It does not yet talk about how to store this environment, but you are right that this can of course also be done similarly efficiently.