Current Events > Largest quantifiable number?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'll give you guys a little more time before I explain the objective here. Until then all I've seen is babbling honestly
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The total number of all Planck-areas in the multiverse?
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Notti posted...

The total number of all Planck-areas in the multiverse?

if someone asked you to name the larrgest number you could think of what would you say?

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Posting TC on r/iamverysmart

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DevsBro posted...

You can do better than that. Way better. Text is an awful way to store a number. If you let it be floating point and make the mantissa 0 length (which is legit, btw), you can get up to 2^(about half a quadrillion).

If you really want to get crazy, you can define your own formats. For example, you could define one byte for a base, one byte for an n and every other for a floating-point number of up arrows:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation

Heh.

That violates the "largest number you could possibly display fully" part of their post. The point of up arrow notation is to write down a representation of numbers that are impossible to write out.

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Trickfinger posted...

if someone asked you to name the larrgest number you could think of what would you say?

Subitizing fails really quickly. So I'll go with like five. After 3-5 numbers start to become really vague so you have to count or do other things to get to a number because otherwise you just see things in terms of relative quantities and not actual numbers.

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This is depressing
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42.

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I want to guess again

It's the wealth gap between Bezos and the lowest paid workers of Amazon
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MarqueeSeries posted...

I want to guess again

It's the wealth gap between Bezos and the lowest paid workers of Amazon

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uwnim posted...

That violates the "largest number you could possibly display fully" part of their post. The point of up arrow notation is to write down a representation of numbers that are impossible to write out.

If any kind of shortenings are disallowed, Arabic numerals should be disallowed too. Writing out a number should only be done in tally marks.

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NightRender posted...

If any kind of shortenings are disallowed, Arabic numerals should be disallowed too. Writing out a number should only be done in tally marks.

That's just a base 1 number system. Changing the base size is completely reasonable and still results in a number being fully written out. It is different from exponents, up arrows and other such things which are more about writing the size of the number

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uwnim posted...

That's just a base 1 number system. Changing the base size is completely reasonable and still results in a number being fully written out. It is different from exponents, up arrows and other such things which are more about writing the size of the number

10 is quite a large number in base googolplex.

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NightRender posted...

10 is quite a large number in base googolplex.

Have fun making that many unique symbols.

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uwnim posted...

Have fun making that many unique symbols.

I don't need to write 10-1. Just 10 works fine.

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And for a serious answer to this poorly explained question: my understanding is that Graham's number is the biggest number that is still in someway useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number

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NightRender posted...

I don't need to write 10-1. Just 10 works fine.

Without those other symbols existing and being defined somewhere, it won't be base googolplex.

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uwnim posted...

Without those other symbols existing and being defined somewhere, it won't be base googolplex.

Tally marks then, delimited by '

0 = 0
1 = '|'
2 = '||'

And so on.

So I guess original answer would be written as '|'0

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Graham's number is my favorite colossal number about which I have read. Once you understand how the up-arrow notation works, and how rapidly the numbers increase from 33 to 33 to 33 ... you are absolutely floored when you are told that the answer to 33 is now the number of arrows in the next iteration.

Seriously. My God.

One (is the only number).

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-largest-number-2

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Josiah_Is_Back posted...

Graham's number is my favorite colossal number about which I have read. Once you understand how the up-arrow notation works, and how rapidly the numbers increase from 33 to 33 to 33 ... you are absolutely floored when you are told that the answer to 33 is now the number of arrows in the next iteration.

Seriously. My God.

What the fuck

Who needs numbers this large
Nobody thats who
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Rika_Furude posted...

What the fuck

Who needs numbers this large
Nobody thats who

I forget exactly but it's the solution to what looks like a pretty ordinary geometry problem.

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DevsBro posted...

I forget exactly but it's the solution to what looks like a pretty ordinary geometry problem.

It's not actually a solution, it's part of a proof that says I don't know what the answer is but I know it's not larger than this.

Anyway 33 is known as g1. When you figure out what that is that's the number of arrows on the first iteration as stated
3(g1)3 is the number of arrows in the second iteration which is g2. You repeat until you get to g64 and then when you solve for that, that is "Graham's number"

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Imagine all the matter in the universe, if it didn't separate into a bunch of stars and stuff, just as soon as it could after the big bang formed itself into an all emcompasing, perfectly efficient computer brain that just spends all of time thinking of bigger and bigger numbers.

It'd work out well defined iterations and quickly get past Grahams number and TREE3 and think of some truly insanely large things. But even the number it gets to at the end of time would be 0% the way to infinity and most finite numbers would still be out of reach, basically inaccessible.

Anyway, that number at the end of time + 1

Woodger posted...

Imagine all the matter in the universe, if it didn't separate into a bunch of stars and stuff, just as soon as it could after the big bang formed itself into an all emcompasing, perfectly efficient computer brain that just spends all of time thinking of bigger and bigger numbers.

It'd work out well defined iterations and quickly get past Grahams number and TREE3 and think of some truly insanely large things. But even the number it gets to at the end of time would be 0% the way to infinity and most finite numbers would still be out of reach, basically inaccessible.

Anyway, that number at the end of time + 1

That number graham numbered a graham number amount of times
And then whatever you want to call my post, graham numbered a graham number amount of times
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your mom

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Woodger posted...

Imagine all the matter in the universe, if it didn't separate into a bunch of stars and stuff, just as soon as it could after the big bang formed itself into an all emcompasing, perfectly efficient computer brain that just spends all of time thinking of bigger and bigger numbers.

It'd work out well defined iterations and quickly get past Grahams number and TREE3 and think of some truly insanely large things. But even the number it gets to at the end of time would be 0% the way to infinity and most finite numbers would still be out of reach, basically inaccessible.

Anyway, that number at the end of time + 1

Graham's number is already bigger than the number of particles in the observable universe. Even if you broke down every particle into component subatomic particles and counted every individual photon and then multiplied that number by 10 it would still be smaller than Graham's number.

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