Race to discover Planet Nine using astronomy and new computational techniques

Re:Race to discover Planet Nine using astronomy and new comp... by everyone on Tuesday August 01, 2017 @12:50AM (#14897956)

This is awesome. Also I found a tiny nitpick

"But the early 1990s also brought a big breakthrough in an algorithm, known as symplectic integration, that reduced computational times by an order of magnitude."

then

"Because symplectic integrators don’t waste time rediscovering Kepler’s laws over and over, they run orbital simulations hundreds of times as fast as older methods do."

100 times as fast is two orders of magnitude.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Race to discover Planet Nine using astronomy and new comp... by ryanx435 on Tuesday August 01, 2017 @01:42AM (#14898155)

Maybe,maybe not. Depends on what base you are measuring magnitude in.

In base 10, 100x is 2 orders of magnitude.

In base 2, the same speed up (written in binary: 1100100x) is between 6 and 7 orders of magnitude.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Race to discover Planet Nine using astronomy and new comp... by Armisael16 on Wednesday August 02, 2017 @12:45PM (#14912169)

No one means any base other than base 10 when they use that phrase in casual speech (without previously saying so).

[ Parent | on HN ]