Silence on the Wire

Practical Considerations

. . . or, perhaps, not just yet. The approach suggested in the aforementioned research is revolutionary and interesting, but not necessarily a particularly practical way to build a supercomputer by stealing from the rich. The amount of bandwidth needed to sustain a reasonable computing rate, and the amount of computations needed to prepare trivia for other systems to solve, is quite high. As a result, this scheme is not efficient enough to outsource the solving of complex mathematical problems to a global supercluster of unwilling victims.

In the scheme outlined earlier, the requirement of exponential computing power is exchanged for the requirement of exponential bandwidth. This is not necessarily a decent trade-off, particularly ...