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A petabyte of storage would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Think of the not too distant future.


Using the following dataset of year to max drive size in bytes per year [1a][1b]: {1956,5.00E+06},{1979,5.71E+08},{1980,1.00E+09},{1991,1.00E+09},{1992,2.10E+09},{1997,1.68E+10},{2003,3.70E+10},{2005,4.00E+10},{2006,1.60E+11},{2006,7.50E+11},{2016,5.00E+12}

Linear regression provides the equation: year = 4.222874399 ln(numBytes) + 1896.534826

Assuming the average bits required to represent a board state is 160 [2], then: 2^155 positions x 160 bits = 9.13e47 bytes

4.222874399 ln(9.13e47) + 1896.534826 = 2362.87979

So, a projection shows that by year 2362, we could have a single storage drive holding every permutation of a board state, so it would be less than 2 drives to store the states along with the move to make for that board. Add more drives and you pull that date in.

References:

1a. http://www.pcworld.com/article/127105/article.html 1b. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2473980/data-storage-so... 2. http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/19397/smallest-c...




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