Comment by dcminter

I vaguely recall building a resource allocation tool using IBM's "ILOG" mixed integer linear programming library and we realised that if we'd built the tool about 20 years earlier it would have still been running for the same problems we were now solving within 5 minutes.

As I recall it the raw computer power had increased by a factor of around a thousand and the algorithms had improved by about the same, giving us a factor of a million improvement.

Worth pondering when trying to predict the future!

The "resources" in question were diamonds by the way...