BlockBeats News, October 5th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article titled “Memory access is O(N^(1/3)).” In the article, he proposed that while arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication, division, etc.) on fixed-size numbers are usually considered to take one time unit, memory access is also assumed to take one time unit, which is not accurate. Both theoretically and practically, memory access actually takes O(N^⅓) time: if your memory is 8 times larger, the time required for read and write operations will double.
Vitalik pointed out that this pattern has practical implications in cryptography and algorithm optimization, and he called for future computing models to more realistically reflect memory hierarchy and physical limitations.
