The capacity of computer chips seems to have reached the limit they say. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every second year, but it seems to have reached its end. Will we get the computer power we need for solving even more complex problems?

It is true that the size of the atoms will prevent us from continuously improve the chips in turns of Transistor density. Although there is a new law that gives us hope: Neven’s Law (proposed by Hartmut Neven, director of Google’s Quantum AI Lab) states:

“Quantum computing power is improving at a doubly exponential growth compared to conventional computing.”

Even though it is a very theoretical law and that it does not consider more practical problems it shows the potential of the future. We will have plenty of computing power.

So how can we use all this force?
Brute force is not only for attacks by cyber criminals, but it could also be a way for you to reach your targets. Brute Force Algorithms are exactly what they sound like – straightforward methods of solving a problem that rely on sheer computing power and trying every possibility rather than finding advanced techniques to improve efficiency and prediction.

For instance, in our latest Hackathon we created solutions that was innovative based on their simplicity and the possibility to use brute force. Instead of finding a way to make the best possible work-schedule they simply created thousands of different schedules and verified by simulation of using the best ones. Simple but time-consuming if you don’t have a lot of capacity to do the simulation and verification, something that is easily managed in a cloud-based solution possible to scale for a heavy workload during a short time, falling back to minimum capacity when the work is done. Easy and not even very costly.

It may sound as an unintelligent and inefficient way to solve problems, to throw all available computer power and memory on it. And this is true. But when the quantum computing takes off will we get higher efficiency, consume less energy and still get more computing power, which makes it all very doable.

If this is combined with an efficient usage where brute force is used in a combination with complex algorithms, where the brute force is used for optimizing and verifying the complex algorithms, we can reach wanted results quicker. We develop complex algorithms that are more efficient when you have huge amounts of data (from an energy, time and cost perspective) and the brute force algorithms are used to verify that the output from the complex, and sometimes hard to understand algorithms, are accurate.

So next time you must solve a problem, maybe you should consider taking the easy way and throw the power of brute force algorithms on it instead of investing a lot of thinking and time to find a complex algorithm that can give you the answer!

Fredrik Töörn
Head of Technology at Stratiteq

About the author
Fredrik is Head of Technology at Stratiteq and states that as most things remain to be done, we should not be afraid of using the force of the cloud to through many small and simple steps solve complex problems.