Perpetual Computing and AI Autonomous Cars - UrIoTNews

The bookstore manager looked at me and said that the computer program that I had developed to analyze the books database was going to run "perpetually" and he was quite steamed about how long it was taking to execute. Well, hold on, let's start this story at the beginning so you'll have some context about what was happening. Back in my college days, I was a gun-for-hire in terms of a willingness to whip together off-the-cuff computer programs for anyone that needed a quick-and-dirty programmable task done, doing so to earn a few extra bucks for those large pepperoni pizzas and kegs of beer that I kept ordering with my classmates. The college bookstore manager had asked me to craft a program that would generate some reports for him. Without taking much time to analyze the situation (that's when I was young and headstrong), I wrote a brute force algorithm that would sort the voluminous data and produce the reports. On a Monday morning, I launched the program and let it fly. In that era, the amount of data involved was considered rather large since it was data for all 30,000 students and included their classes, the books required for their classes, etc. When the bookstore manager asked me how long it would take for the program to run, I hedged and said it would take about a day.