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Catalytic computing taps the full power of a full hard drive
Ten years ago, researchers proved that adding full memory can theoretically aid computation. They’re just now beginning to understand the implications.
But their work didn’t rule out the possibility of bizarre algorithms that could somehow use the same piece of memory for storage and calculations simultaneously — the computing equivalent of using a page filled with important notes as scratch paper. After the talk, he was approached by a graduate student named Ian Mertz, who’d fallen in love with catalytic computing five years earlier after learning about it as an impressionable young undergrad. Meanwhile, Cook and Mertz’s results have galvanized interest in catalytic computing, with new works exploring connections to randomness and the effects of allowing a fewmistakes in resetting the full memory to its original state.
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