[CallMeIshmael]

FWIW, I tend to do a fair amouont of programming in my spare time, and this question this sort of stems from my observation that, in general, tasks I want to solve almost always fall into either group 1 or 3. Most of the time, a computation takes fewer than 20 minutes or (by best estimates) so long that I would need to live thousands or millions of years to see the result.


It appears that, at least for the tasks Im interested in, the growth in the graph of programs vs time is very VERY fast once you get past 1 hour.