#max speed

honestly yeah that does really feel like it removes some of the oomf with bart’s character & makes me wonder what they’re doing with dawn & don?? there’s a whole backstory there in how thawne’s hatred fucked up his family so much that he ruined his daughter & grandson’s life because she fell in love with don & that is part of what leads to bart’s displacement out of time & his dynamics with other people. he’s a quippy speedster hiding a lot of pain & it’s max that helps him, not barry. this just feels like recreating the barry & wally dynamic but worse.

Oochy Koochy  (12" /45 RPM)

F. U. Baby Yeh Yeh

Baby Ford

Rhythm King Records - 1988

artwork: Max Speed

Multiplying 2 x 2 is easy. But multiplying two numbers with more than a billion digits each — that takes some serious computation.

The multiplication technique taught in grade school may be simple, but for really big numbers, it’s too slow to be useful. Now, two mathematicians say that they’ve found the fastest way yet to multiply extremely large figures.

The duo claim to have achieved an ultimate speed limit for multiplication, first suggested nearly 50 years ago. That feat, described online March 18 at the document archive HAL, has not yet passed the gauntlet of peer review. But if the technique holds up to scrutiny, it could prove to be the fastest possible way of multiplying whole numbers, or integers.

If you ask an average person what mathematicians do, “they say, ‘Oh, they sit in their office multiplying big numbers together,’” jokes study coauthor David Harvey of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “For me, it’s actually true.”  

When making calculations with exorbitantly large numbers, the most important measure of speed is how quickly the number of operations needed — and hence the time required to do the calculation — grows as you multiply longer and longer strings of digits.  

That growth is expressed in terms of n, defined as the number of digits in the numbers being multiplied. For the new technique, the number of operations required is proportional to n times the logarithm of n, expressed as O(n log n) in mathematical lingo. That means that, if you double the number of digits, the number of operations required will increase a bit faster, more than doubling the time the calculation takes.

But, unlike simpler methods of multiplication, the time needed doesn’t quadruple, or otherwise rapidly blow up, as the number of digits creeps up, report Harvey and Joris van der Hoeven of the French national research agency CNRS and École Polytechnique in Palaiseau. That slower growth rate makes products of bigger numbers more manageable to calculate.

The previously predicted max speed for multiplication was O(n log n), meaning the new result meets that expected limit. Although it’s possible an even speedier technique might one day be found, most mathematicians think this is as fast as multiplication can get.

“I was very much astonished that it had been done,” says theoretical computer scientist Martin Fürer of Penn State. He discovered another multiplication speedup in 2007, but gave up on making further improvements. “It seemed quite hopeless to me.”