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A conversation between myself and cha0s included a discussion on HUGE numbers - I mean HUGE.

Quote:if your mind can comprehend a number larger than the mnumber of atoms in the universe, does that mean your mind is not limited to the physiocal universe?

We were originally talking about the internet and it's IP numbers, so I told him about IPv6. He suggested why not go 64 bit numbers? 2^64 was like nearly 2 billion terabytes.

I remembered something I got told back in school. You cannot visualise a number such as 10^10^100. There isn't enough atoms in the universe to hold a number that large.

That worked out to be 10 billion googols or something...

Your thoughts?

A number is not related to the physical universe, it's an abstraction, such as.. time (Ever so popular lately)

Just because I can comprehend a huge number, and understand what it says, the name of it (hundred, thousand, etc), does not mean anything.

Also, we dont kow the number of atoms.. Scientist ahve guessed the number of atoms. Guessing and knowing is far from the same (Once again something very popular in science today, a guess equal truth if enough people guess the same)

10^100 is 1 googol (1 followed by 100 zeroes). The best estimates of how many particles there are in the universe (let alone atoms) are less than 1 googol, so a googol of anything is really impossible.
10^(10^100) is 1 googolplex, which is 1 followed by one googol zeroes.
One googol takes up 333 bits. Interestingly, most handheld calculators stop doing factorials at 69, and the factorial of 70 is roughly one googol. So a calculator can deal with as big a number as ~(10^100)/70.

Read the wikipedia entry.

My computer says 1.#INF.

Hehe...

Windows Calculator starts giving me warnings that the operations will "take a very long time" when I start trying to square 10^250000. Heheh.

"Invalid inout for function"

That's what I got.

Oops, sorry I meant 25000.

Using the BIGINT string math library for QB, I once entered something like 1000^1000, that gave a pretty big number.. And took a small eternity to run..

I tried it on the MS Student Graphic Calculator, here's what I got:


Wouldn't show me the actual number, it just gave me the exponent...

That can't be right. There's only 80-something zeroes in the exponent. There should be 100.
The actual number can not be written - there aren't enough molecules of ink in the entire universe.