How Design Quality Improves with Increasing Computational Abilities: General Formulas and Case Study of Aircraft Fuel Efficiency

Abstract

It is known that the problems of optimal design are NP-hard – meaning that, in general, a feasible algorithm can only produce close-to-optimal designs. The more computations we perform, the better design we can produce. In this paper, we theoretically derive quantitative formulas describing how the design qualities improves with the increasing computational abilities. We then empirically confirm the resulting theoretical formula by applying it to the problem of aircraft fuel efficiency.