{"id":643,"date":"2026-04-16T15:30:30","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T19:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/?p=643"},"modified":"2026-04-16T10:12:27","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T14:12:27","slug":"back-of-the-envelope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/index.php\/2026\/04\/16\/back-of-the-envelope\/","title":{"rendered":"Back of the envelope"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just ran my woosy LLM player (not a long prompt, not very involved logic) on my CPU\/GPU in a 10-round IPD game against 25 opponents. That agent&#8217;s node had a degree of 6 throughout. On my system, taking no special steps to do anything fast, this took 3 mins 40 secs.<\/p>\n<p>Assuming linearity (possibly conservative, but then again GPUs are hard to use in parallel if you don&#8217;t have additional hardware sitting around to exploit) and assuming our contest has 25 LLM players (1 per student) also with average degree of 6, here&#8217;s a rough estimate for how long it would take to run games of varying lengths:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>10 iterations &mdash; 5500 secs = 91.7 mins = <b>1.5 hours<\/b><\/li>\n<li>100 iterations &mdash; 55,000 secs = 917 mins = <b>15.3 hours<\/b><\/li>\n<li>1000 iterations &mdash; 550,000 secs = 9167 mins = 153 hours = <b>6.3 days<\/b> <i style=\"font-size:small;\">(Stephen&#8217;s original plan)<\/i><\/li>\n<li>1,000,000 iterations &mdash; 550,000,000 secs = 9,166,666 mins = 152,778 hours = 6365 days = <b>17.4 years<\/b> <i style=\"font-size:small;\">(Garrett&#8217;s and Marina&#8217;s preference)<\/i><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just ran my woosy LLM player (not a long prompt, not very involved logic) on my CPU\/GPU in a 10-round IPD game against 25 opponents. That agent&#8217;s node had a degree of 6 throughout. On my system, taking no special steps to do anything fast, this took 3 mins 40 secs. Assuming linearity (possibly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":646,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions\/646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/data420\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}