• Pazuzu
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    1 year ago

    I thought this had to be hyperbole, so I did the math myself. I’m assuming human history is 200,000 years as google says, and we want to narrow this down to the second the bike disappeared. also that the bike instantly vanished so there’s no partially existing bike.

    each operation divides the time left in half, so to get from 200k years (6.311×10^12 seconds) to 1 would take ~42.58 divisions, call it 43. even if we take a minute on average to seek and decide whether the bike is there or not it would still be less than an hour of manual sorting

    hell, at 60fps it would only take another 6 divisions to narrow it down to a single frame, still under an hour

    edit: to use the entire hour we’d need a couple more universes worth of video time to sort through, 36.5 billion years worth to be exact. or a measly 609 million years if we need to find that single frame at 60fps

    • rckclmbr@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I regularly bisect commits in the range of 200k (on the low end) for finding causes of bugs. It takes me minutes. Pretty crazy

    • psud@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      History is about 10k years, the 200k years is mostly pre-history. People didn’t write stuff down until they invented agriculture and needed to track trade between owners, workers, etc

    • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Combine AI image/visual-pattern recognition and quantum computing, and this search could be completed before it was even started.

      • Pazuzu
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        1 year ago

        Takes time to precisely seek to each timestamp, but really I just meant that an hour was reasonable even with a lazy cop doing the search

    • stockRot@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Ever heard of a logarithm? If you haven’t, you just reinvented it.

      Also, your math is wrong: log base 2 of 200,000 is ~18

      • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        You did 200k years. You need to do 200k years as seconds (the 6.311e12 they mentioned). Their math is right.

        Not sure why you’re acting like they claimed to invent the logarithm, either…