3 ms·

This is a great example of how you can trade time for space. There’s no reason you couldn’t do the same thing for chess, except it would take, er, quite a bit o

• ithkuil 3y ago
  there are even more possible variations of chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe.
  • pimlottc 3y ago
    Yeah, I'd definitely have to delete some old emails.
  • zimpenfish 3y ago
    My favourite "big but comprehensible generation number" is the count of unique shuffles of a standard deck of 52 cards. (this is my best recollection of the "this is how insane it is" story, numbers may be slightly off) Iterate through a billion possible shuffles a second and every yearly anniversary, take a 1M pace around the equator. When you get back to your starting point (after 40,075 years), take 1cc out of the Pacific Ocean. When the ocean is empty, put one A4 piece of 0.05mm paper on a pile. Now you start filling the ocean 1cc every circumnavigation. When it's full, A4 piece of paper on the pile. etc. By the time you exhaust the list of shuffles, the pile will be 188 light years tall.
• koliber 3y ago
  For something slightly more practical here's a printable PDF representation of googolplex: http://www.googolplexwrittenout.com/ http://www.googolplexwrittenout.com/
  • cpach 3y ago
    I remember that 'idlewords once ran out of disk space on his server because a Pinboard user bookmarked some page that had written out a very large number (googolplex or similar) and the archived HTML was something like 50 GB or so :) (I don’t remember the exact details now so take it with a grain of salt.)