Computers are fast

Let’s find out how well you know computers!

All of these programs have a variable N in them. Your mission: guess how big N must get before the program takes 1 second to run.

You don’t need to guess exactly. Just try to guess the right order of magnitude! The options are all between one (10^0) and ten billion (10^10).

But first, some introductory points

• If the answer is 38,400, both 10,000 and 100,000 are considered correct answers. The goal is to not be wrong by more than 10x, one order of magnitude 🤓.
• We know computers have different disk & network & CPU speeds! We’re trying to understand the difference between code that can run ten times a second (10 Hz) and 100,000 times a second (100 KHz). A newer computer won’t make any of the benchmark code run 1000x faster.
  • That said, the results are from running on an 2023 Mac M2 Max with Python 3.11.7 and rustc 1.78.0 (9b00956e5 2024-04-29).
• The Rust code was compiled with --release, of course.

Good luck! The first time I tried the original quiz (2014) I did decently but got a handful wrong. Each surprise is an invitation to question assumptions, and learn something new!