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Yeah this part bothered me. It's surprising if they really didn't immediately realize randomly looking at single bills was an impossible strategy. Kind of an i

by uses 2y ago

Yeah this part bothered me. It's surprising if they really didn't immediately realize randomly looking at single bills was an impossible strategy. Kind of an interesting problem. Complete sorting in a timely manner is basically not possible because of the physical reality of 100k pieces of paper. But maybe you can group the bills into 100 piles of "last 2 digits", so then for each lookup you "only" have to check 1000 bills. And then later, while searching a group, you can take the time to further sort them by the 3rd digit. I guess it also depends on how long you expect the contest to go on, i.e. how many lookups you will do. Even with the simplified grouping strategy, let's be generous and assume it takes you 3 seconds to look at a bill, figure out what to do with it, and physically move it to the correct place. That's still 83 person-hours to do a single pass and put the bills into 100 groups for quicker lookup. With 2 people, that's 5 full 8 hour days of non-stop sorting.

bluGill 2y ago
I would copy the serials onto paper in sorted order. Then I only need to find the bill after I know I have it. I'd still need to find the bill on demand - but you typically get 10 minutes to call and then days to prove it (this was the 1980s - you couldn't email a digital photo back then. Today I'd forge the digital photo and have hours to set the real one aside for when they check)
- nucleardog 2y ago
  This is more or less the way I’d go. It’s “what the client asked for” versus “what solves the client’s problem”. You don’t need to find the bill within minutes, you need to know that you _have_ the bill quickly. Grab a big binder, half dozen packs of dividers, a pack of loose leaf paper, and a box of pens. Divide the binder into ranges. In each range use a separate piece of paper for the next digit. Don’t worry about sorting past there, just write all your serial numbers down. Now you can use the dividers to narrow it down to around 2,000 bills. Flipping through ten pages to find the next digit you’ve narrowed it down to about 200 bills. You can probably scan two hundred numbers quickly enough.
scottyah 2y ago
I think I'd scan them all, and divide them into 100 piles of 1,000. While one person is working on uploading and processing scans to a database system (tagging/adding a field for its pile), the other could be sorting the piles if they want. Basically, seeing if you have a match and limiting it to a pile of 1,000 while not having too much overhead of a ton of different piles. If you do match, each person could check through 500 bills easily, and there's no sorting needed.
- kragen 2y ago
  in 01984 the apparatus to scan them all would have cost you more than the bills
  - gravescale 2y ago
    Indeed, the first consumer digital camera, the Sony Mavica was only 3 years old and wrote still frames to tape, and it would still be 2 years before a digital still video camera would make it to the US market, and you'd have to shuffle the images around on a Still Video Floppy, as USB (and 1.0 at that) wouldn't appear for another 12 years, and even the first serial port webcam would be 10 years.
    - kragen 2y ago
      there existed drum scanners, flatbed scanners, and I think even hand scanners that you could drag over a bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scanner#Hand_document_scanner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scanner#Hand_document_sc... but maybe you'd have to check computer shopper from 01984 to be sure

by uses 2y ago

bluGill 2y ago

I would copy the serials onto paper in sorted order. Then I only need to find the bill after I know I have it. I'd still need to find the bill on demand - but you typically get 10 minutes to call and then days to prove it (this was the 1980s - you couldn't email a digital photo back then. Today I'd forge the digital photo and have hours to set the real one aside for when they check)

nucleardog 2y ago
This is more or less the way I’d go. It’s “what the client asked for” versus “what solves the client’s problem”. You don’t need to find the bill within minutes, you need to know that you _have_ the bill quickly. Grab a big binder, half dozen packs of dividers, a pack of loose leaf paper, and a box of pens. Divide the binder into ranges. In each range use a separate piece of paper for the next digit. Don’t worry about sorting past there, just write all your serial numbers down. Now you can use the dividers to narrow it down to around 2,000 bills. Flipping through ten pages to find the next digit you’ve narrowed it down to about 200 bills. You can probably scan two hundred numbers quickly enough.

scottyah 2y ago

I think I'd scan them all, and divide them into 100 piles of 1,000. While one person is working on uploading and processing scans to a database system (tagging/adding a field for its pile), the other could be sorting the piles if they want. Basically, seeing if you have a match and limiting it to a pile of 1,000 while not having too much overhead of a ton of different piles. If you do match, each person could check through 500 bills easily, and there's no sorting needed.

kragen 2y ago
in 01984 the apparatus to scan them all would have cost you more than the bills
- gravescale 2y ago
  Indeed, the first consumer digital camera, the Sony Mavica was only 3 years old and wrote still frames to tape, and it would still be 2 years before a digital still video camera would make it to the US market, and you'd have to shuffle the images around on a Still Video Floppy, as USB (and 1.0 at that) wouldn't appear for another 12 years, and even the first serial port webcam would be 10 years.
  - kragen 2y ago
    there existed drum scanners, flatbed scanners, and I think even hand scanners that you could drag over a bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scanner#Hand_document_scanner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scanner#Hand_document_sc... but maybe you'd have to check computer shopper from 01984 to be sure