alt Hacker NewsThe core aspect of information theory is how much information fits in a sphere. Getting from there to memory access latency in a real computer is several abstractions away and a lot of those abstractions might not hold.
The core aspect of information theory is how much information fits in a sphere. Getting from there to memory access latency in a real computer is several abstractions away and a lot of those abstractions might not hold.
It says that for a sufficiently large storage system, the information within will ultimately be limited by the surface area and not the volume. That you can indeed judge a book by its cover. For the sake of asymptotic analysis of galactic algorithms, one need only consider schemes for reading and writing information on the surface of a sphere. Where it comes to "real hardware," this sort of analysis is inapplicable.