Google goes greenish

The article “The Greening of Google” [October] outlined the company’s plan to locate a data center in Oregon near “cheap and abundant” hydropower. This is presented as if that were somehow a positive thing consistent with its conservation efforts. While admittedly renewable, hydro is a limited resource that the company has elected to use up, most likely based on the “cheap” part of the quote.

Data centers can require upward of 25 000 ­kilowatts, enough power to serve between 10 000 and 15 000 homes or between 50 and 80 typical commercial customers. Most of that load is just for cooling the waste heat from the electronics. The hydro resource Google will consume must be replaced with some type of base-load generating unit that probably won’t have such a positive public relations value. Unless Google pays a “tap” fee equivalent to the tremendous costs associated with building all the facilities required to generate and transmit this additional energy, these costs will be paid for by others in the community. In return, the local community might benefit from as few as 20 new jobs.

The focus should continue to be on energy efficiency and conservation rather than “cheap and abundant.” While growth and economic development are crucial to communities, electric loads such as these come with system and environmental costs that you never seem to find in a Web search.

Tom Schaeffer

IEEE Member

Longmont, Colo.

In the October issue’s Spectral Lines there’s a picture showing “Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page plugging in a RechargeIT hybrid electric car.”

You failed to mention that once the car was charged, they could’ve driven it to the airport to fly on their private Boeing 767 jetliner, which as we all know, is a very fuel-efficient mode of personal transportation.

Joseph Katz

IEEE Fellow

Stony Brook, N.Y.

Not as hard as we thought

In Feng-Hsiung Hsu’s article “Cracking Go” [October], he lists the number of possible game positions for chess and Go at 10¹²⁰ and 10¹⁷⁰. I’m perplexed by his number for chess. A simple analysis of Go indicates that, as an upper limit, not accounting for certain “impossible” configurations as restricted by the rules, there are three possible states (black stone, white stone, no stone) in each of the 19-by-19 interstices. So that comes out to 3^(19 x 19) possible game positions, or about 1.74 x 10¹⁷²—close enough to the 10170 number given by Hsu. If I apply this same analysis to chess, however, I fall quite a bit short. There are six unique white pieces (pawn, knight, rook, bishop, king, and queen) and six unique black pieces, as well as the possibility of no piece in a given spot, on a grid of 64 squares, for a possible 13⁶⁴ game positions, or about 2 x 10⁷¹. Even this number greatly overestimates things, because there cannot, for example, be 64 white pawns on a board! The gap between chess and Go is much wider than Hsu indicates.

Ben Thompson

State College, Pa.

Senior Editor Philip E. Ross responds: As Thompson and several other readers noted, there was an error in our table comparing chess with Go. It turns out that the best estimate of the number of possible game positions in chess is 10⁴⁴, 76 orders of magnitude lower than the number we listed. We regret the error.

Basic Calculations

Thanks to IEEE Spectrum and Kenneth R. Foster for rekindling some old memories with the review of the new HP 35s calculator [Resources, October]. I was a Ph.D. student back in 1975 and somehow managed to find the money to buy a shiny, brand-new HP 35. It made me the envy of most of the other graduate students in the school of engineering at the University of Auckland. This was in the days when programming a computer involved a stack of punch cards, and you got the answer the next day—if you hadn’t made a mistake in your Fortran. I seem to remember the calculator had a distinctive, almost sweet smell to the plastic.

The HP 35 worked flawlessly for several years and made it with me to Ottawa, where I had taken a job with Miller Communications in 1979. Unfortunately I dropped it one day, and a big ceramic IC cracked. HP wanted $200 to fix the calculator. A new unit of similar performance (but without the nice smell) was about half that price. Still, I have regretted the decision to buy a second-rate all-plastic IC calculator ever since. I have not managed to kill it, though, even with numerous drops onto concrete.

Philip E.D. Wakeman

IEEE Member

Auckland, New Zealand

Your article reminded me of two calculator-related incidents in my past. First: some years ago, all the engineers in my company were given free TI calculators. I can’t remember the model number. Mine was stolen, and I had to buy my own replacement. Second: I won an HP sweepstakes for subscribers to an HP engineering magazine. The prize was the HP 19B, a business calculator!

You can’t win for losing.

Bob Schuchman

IEEE Life Member

San Diego

Correction

In the October issue, the voltages were reversed in the “Quantum Tunneling Creates Fast Lane for Wireless” diagrams.