>> My Amiga 1200 renders the benchmark - the *old* benchmark, SKYVASE.POV -
>> in about 2.5 hours. :-P
> 
> Has anyone ever run the benchmark on an abacus?

That would be a vacuous test; it is the speed of the operator, not the 
speed of the abacus itself.

It might, however, be interesting to see how fast a human can do the 
computations by hand. (And, let us not forget, how accurately!)

[Actually, this would not be "interesting" at all for the poor **** 
doing the calculations!]

Interestingly, a human can theoretically perform X computations per 
minute. So if you work out how many computations are required to ray 
trace a single image, you can work out how many humans it would take, in 
principle, to achieve realtime framerates.

[Obviously, this somewhat neglects the latency. If it takes a human 10 
seconds to do a calculation, then no matter how many humans are working 
in parallel, it will always take at least 10 seconds to do any set of 
calculations.]

Lest I jest, I should point out that at one point I sat down and wrote 
out an algorithm for ray tracing a simple scene, optimised for hand 
computation. If you had a graph paper, a set of pencils, and a crapload 
of free time, you could in fact ray trace by hand following this 
algorithm. Jesus I was bored that day...

PS. "Lest I jest" looks French to me for some reason.

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