I just remembered what the time boundary I was talking about was actually trying to measure: it had nothing to do with the speed of computation; it was the speed of typing in the program code. That's why 1 state per second was a reasonable estimate (if not overly optimistic). If you tried to type in all those ifs and prints manually, that's what would take you longer than the heat death of the universe.

Besides, even executing the program can't do 100 million states per second because it only does one state transition and then waits for user input.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 months ago

Oh I was assuming you'd write another program to create this program, like the "4 billion if's" blog post if you've read it.