https://computers-are-fast.github.io

Do you know how much your computer can do in a second?

Let's find out how well you know computers! All of these programs
have a variable NUMBER in them. Your mission: guess how big NUMBER
needs to get before the program takes 1 second to run.

You don't need to guess exactly: they're all between 1 and a billion.
Just try to guess the right order of magnitude! A few notes:

  * If the answer is 38,000, both 10,000 and 100,000 are considered
    correct answers. The goal is to not be wrong by more than 10x :)
  * We know computers have different disk & network & CPU speeds!
    We're trying to get you to tell the difference between code that
    can run 10 times/s and 100000 times/s. A newer computer won't
    make your code run 1000x faster :)
  * That said, all this was run on a new laptop with a fast SSD and a
    sketchy network connection. The C code was compiled with gcc -O2.

Good luck! We were surprised by a lot of these. We'll be anonymously
collecting your answers, so expect some graphs in the future! =D

Made for you by Julia Evans (@b0rk) and Kamal Marhubi (@kamalmarhubi
).