What improves at a faster speed: playing strength due to chess engine improvements or playing strength due to hardware improvements? In other words, if you were a freestyle or correspondence chess player who wants to win, would you prefer to have access to the CPU, RAM etc. that are produced 6 years ahead in the future (using the cost in the future minus inflation)
OR
the highest rated chess engine 6 years in the future? (assume noone could reverse engineer either)?

And how much better is it exactly? In other words, whatever the answer is (either hardware or software 6 years form now), what critical value of the inferior technology (the one you think would increase the strength less) is equivalent to the improvements of the better tech. Let's say the answer is software and you would have an ELO of 3700 today with this new engine on hardware (that costs C amount of money), how many years down the line of a hardware (costing C amount of money minus the inflation) would you need to reach an ELO of 3700 on the best engine today?

Now after getting a feel for the impact of hardware and software, I also wonder how computational length impacts the quality of play: After 1 second, 10 seconds, 100 seconds, 1000 seconds, 10000 seconds, 100000 seconds, 1M seconds and so on, how much better does the move get?