I thought this had to be hyperbole, so I did the math myself. I'm assuming human history is 200,000 years as google says, and we want to narrow this down to the second the bike disappeared. also that the bike instantly vanished so there's no partially existing bike.

each operation divides the time left in half, so to get from 200k years (6.311×10^12 seconds) to 1 would take ~42.58 divisions, call it 43. even if we take a minute on average to seek and decide whether the bike is there or not it would still be less than an hour of manual sorting

hell, at 60fps it would only take another 6 divisions to narrow it down to a single frame, still under an hour

edit: to use the entire hour we'd need a couple more universes worth of video time to sort through, 36.5 billion years worth to be exact. or a measly 609 million years if we need to find that single frame at 60fps

[–] [email protected] 69 points 11 months ago

I regularly bisect commits in the range of 200k (on the low end) for finding causes of bugs. It takes me minutes. Pretty crazy

[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago

Lemmy learns exponential math.

Mostly joking, thanks for doing the math.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

History is about 10k years, the 200k years is mostly pre-history. People didn't write stuff down until they invented agriculture and needed to track trade between owners, workers, etc

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

True and interesting to note. OOP says 'dawn of humanity' though, not recorded history, so taking 200k as 'human history' is also valid.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, I'm used to the narrower meaning of "history", meaning recorded. I like that definition as it lets you differentiate between it and prehistory.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Definitely a useful distinction.

[–] sukhmel 1 points 11 months ago

Well, in this case it must have been recorded on video, so could as well start recording before inventing the writing

[–] MagnoliaMayhem 13 points 11 months ago

Just watch at 3X!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Combine AI image/visual-pattern recognition and quantum computing, and this search could be completed before it was even started.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

We can go deeper!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

A minute to decide if there is a bike in the picture really ?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

As a robot, finding bikes in pictures is really hard, okay

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Takes time to precisely seek to each timestamp, but really I just meant that an hour was reasonable even with a lazy cop doing the search

[–] sukhmel 2 points 11 months ago

They must be really bad at solving CAPTCHA