3 ms·

I'm not sure how Clarke came up with the number nine billion, but the short mentions 10 places, and shows the computer printing out some script that may be Tibe

• downvotetruth 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God#Mathematical_note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God#... worst case n=13, 4bit char encoding: 4x9x115x10^8=414x10^9 bits~385.6 GB - all to RAM /~32 GB/s ~12s
• em-bee 4y ago
  what i have been wondering is, no matter how fast the computer prints the names, how long does it take to read them? if they can parallelize the task, assuming an average reading speed of 300 words per minute and the names having average english word length (5 characters per word), each monk reading for 16 hours per day, they would need 300 monks in order to read all names within 100 days. so it seems manageable, even if we add some slack or assume longer names, but a faster computer would not help much. more concerning is the printing speed. a dot-matrix printer in 1957 could print maybe 1500 characters per minute, and with the average word length of 5, that means one human could read everything as fast as the printer can print it. two or three people taking shifts around the clock would be enough to keep up. so the limit is not people but printers, and in order to complete the task in 100 days a few hundred printers would be needed, because a single printer at that speed would still need 100 years to print all the names. computer displays would not help much, because you still need one display per person.
• adiM 4y ago
  But printing them, would take some time and paper.