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posted by dennisn on October 13th, 2010 at 1:39PM

For the sake of simplicity, say we're typing in a text editor.

(The number of letters in a book is /nothing/ compared to a googolplex :P.)

(Oh, by the way, if you use every subatomic particle in the entire universe, as a decimal position, you, ummm, still wouldn't be able to "write" it out.)

(A googolplex, btw, is /nothing/ compared to Graham's Number.)

** I think my original post was wrong. 1GB = 10^9 Bytes, 1 Trillion = 10^12 (1TB = 1000GB), 1 googolplex = 10^10^100, so you would need 10^(10^100 - 9) GB of disk space, which is a hell of a lot more than the originally stated 2*10^(12) GB. I did say "at least" though :P.
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posted by unavailable on October 13th, 2010 at 1:58PM

unavailable

posted by dennisn on October 13th, 2010 at 2:00PM

Oui. There are only something like 10^85 things in the entire universe. (No matter how small you cut it ... up to the smallest Planck Volume, obviously.) That's nothing compared to even a googol (10^100). And completely negligible compared to a googolplex (10^10^100).

posted by unavailable on October 13th, 2010 at 2:11PM

unavailable

posted by dennisn on October 13th, 2010 at 2:18PM

Graham's number, for one, "is an upper bound on the solution to a certain problem [1] in Ramsey theory." http://en.wikipedia.org/w...raham%27s_number

[1] Consider an n-dimensional hypercube, and connect each pair of vertices to obtain a complete graph on 2^n vertices. Then colour each of the edges of this graph either red or blue.
What is the smallest value of n for which every such colouring contains at least one single-coloured 4-vertex planar complete subgraph?


Googol(plex) aren't too useful, besides descriptively. (A googol is "astronomical", a googolplex is hyper-mega astronomical, etc.)

unavailable by unavailable on October 13th, 2010 at 6:07PM.
I have no idea what they're ta by dennisn on October 13th, 2010 at 6:19PM.