Comment by niemandhier
4 days ago
Triple product (efficiency ) has increased faster than moors law for the last 50 years.
Still people make jokes about fusion research, some things just take time.
I recommend this excellent review of the even more excellent book „The future of fusion energy“
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-future...
> Triple product (efficiency ) has increased faster than moors law for the last 50 years
Fusion research progress is underappreciated. But Moore's Law is for an existing industry. Prior to that, it took 10 ^ 6+ improvements in various technologies to make computing possible.
Not sure what you mean by that. There was a bunch of computing technology long before photolithography or even transistors. And mores law was coined in 1965 when individual chips had far less than 10^6 transistors while the first one was made by hand.
Indeed, I often think if I were transported to the past I would use rivers and dams to make logic gates.
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Moore's law is self propagating: improvements in compute beget improvements in compute by improving the computers used to design compute devices. fusion, while in an impressive bootstrapping phase, does not get that acceleration until commercial break-even.
Untrue on both counts. Moore's law is not due to improved computing power in the design process, it's due to an incredibly long series of process improvements which become easier to develop because of the increased understanding of the problems they are seeking to solve.
Likewise advancements in fusion beget advancements in fusion by increasing understanding of the challenges faced.
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moore's law is just the observation that chips are 2d: linear shrinks produce exponential benefit.
I can't see anything like a linear/square relation in fusion reactor design (even accepting that ML's premise of shrinks being linear in time is not a law, just something that sometimes happened, and sometimes didn't...)