Need to make a formal correction; I recalled this information incorrectly.
7.5 Years into the project they were at 1% completion. 15 was the total amount of time targeted.
"Halfway through the genome project, the project’s original critics were still going strong, pointing out that we were halfway through the 15 year project and only 1 percent of the genome had been identified. The project was declared a failure by many skeptics at this point. But the project had been doubling in price-performance and capacity every year, and at one percent it was only seven doublings (at one year per doubling) away from completion. It was indeed completed seven years later. Similarly, my projection of a worldwide communication network tying together tens and ultimately hundreds of millions of people, emerging in the mid to late 1990s, was scoffed at in the 1980s, when the entire U.S. Defense Budget could only tie together a few thousand scientists with the ARPANET. But it happened as I predicted, and again this resulted from the power of exponential growth."
When did he make that prediction? Was it in 1997, or was it a retrospective analysis made after the project was complete?
The draft genome was available in early 2001. How does that fit into the timeline? According to the doubling prediction, with 4 years to go less than 20% of the genome should have been available.
It took another 3 years until it was called "done", which means that the simple measurement of completion was not exponential, but more likely S-curved. (I think parts of the genome still aren't sequenced because of the regions of high repeats.)
7.5 Years into the project they were at 1% completion. 15 was the total amount of time targeted.
"Halfway through the genome project, the project’s original critics were still going strong, pointing out that we were halfway through the 15 year project and only 1 percent of the genome had been identified. The project was declared a failure by many skeptics at this point. But the project had been doubling in price-performance and capacity every year, and at one percent it was only seven doublings (at one year per doubling) away from completion. It was indeed completed seven years later. Similarly, my projection of a worldwide communication network tying together tens and ultimately hundreds of millions of people, emerging in the mid to late 1990s, was scoffed at in the 1980s, when the entire U.S. Defense Budget could only tie together a few thousand scientists with the ARPANET. But it happened as I predicted, and again this resulted from the power of exponential growth."
http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-ray-kurzw...