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Tim Jacoby · Awkronos

What if?

One absurd question per post, then the arithmetic, all the way down, until the question has a number attached to it. Two walks are published. Both end somewhere stranger than they started.

8.5 × 10⁴⁸
possible lives counted
175,700
triangles in the scan
37yrs
Rodin worked
2,456
mills to finish by Tuesday
?askcountthe number

walk 01 · april 2026

How long would a quantum computer take to find the best possible life you could live?

Seventy forks, about five options at each: a toy model with 8.5 × 10⁴⁸ possible lives in it. Check one per nanosecond and you finish in 2.7 × 10³² years, twenty billion trillion times the age of the universe. Grover's algorithm takes the square root and gets you to 2.9 × 10²⁴ queries, about 92 million years. Then the walk stops asking for the best life and asks for a good one, and the arithmetic collapses to 343 microseconds.

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1234570 forks

walk 02 · april 2026 · with jill

What if a bar ordered The Gates of Hell?

Rodin took the commission in 1880 against an 1885 deadline. He missed it, returned the money in 1895, and died in 1917 with the doors still in plaster. You run Doors-R-Us. You have a laser cutter, a CNC mill, a bronze foundry, and 96 hours. The skin texture alone is a 900-kilometer raster path. To finish by Tuesday you need 2,456 five-axis mills running at once, and the fastest honest route still takes 90 days.

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Act 01

A square root is not a rescue.

Grover's 1996 result searches N items in about √N steps, which sounds like it should end the argument. It does not. The square root of 8.5 × 10⁴⁸ is 2.9 × 10²⁴, and at a billion oracle queries a second that is still 92 million years. Quadratic speedup against a 49-digit number buys you a smaller unreachable answer.

Act 02

Fifty percent off optimal, in polynomial time.

The way out is to stop asking for the best. Christofides' algorithm returns a tour within 50 percent of the optimum for any metric instance, and it does it fast. Nobody is searching 8.5 × 10⁴⁸ lives. Everyone is running a greedy heuristic with a bound they never computed.

Act 03

Nine hundred kilometers, one spinning ball.

A five-axis mill carves bronze in raster passes, like mowing a lawn. Roughing the doors with a 20 mm flat tool is a 7.6 km path and 159 hours. Faces and hands at a 1.2 mm stepover is 120 km and 5,000 hours. Skin texture at 0.05 mm is 900 km and roughly 150,000 hours. The cascade totals about 235,747 machine-hours: 26.9 years on one machine, running day and night.

jill.awkronos.com · gemstone optics, and the co-author on the doors walkaudrey.awkronos.com · curling physics and the Hertz contact modelkristi.awkronos.com · the travelling-salesman work behind the 50 percent boundbecky.awkronos.com · what a mortgage is worth once the gut is a parameterGrover 1996 · a fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database searchRodin, The Gates of Hell, 1880–1917 · the original plaster at the Musée d'Orsay, eight bronze casts since

Two walks are up. The next question is already counting.

Both are free. Both start with something you could ask at a bar. Both end in arithmetic that refuses to be reasonable.