Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> 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.

Ooh, I don't know, what if it were a Fisher-Price 1200 with 16 64-bead racks,
magnetic bead locking and automatic reset springs? ;-)

> [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.]

That's OK - if you get enough mates round, you might still beat the benchmarks
mentioned further up this thread!

> 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...

I was just wondering about that as I read the top bits. You'd want to practice,
too, to make sure you were performing optimally.

:)

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