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It is estimated that in its existence the observable universe has performed no more than 10^120 operations on no more than 10^90 bits. Thus I believe the univer
by wbhart 13y ago
It is estimated that in its existence the observable universe has performed no more than 10^120 operations on no more than 10^90 bits. Thus I believe the universe itself does not have the computational capacity to compute each one of the partitions of 10^5. As we are part of the universe, neither do we.
Edit: just to be clear, I'm referring to the obviously comedic comments about the Hungarian Pengo, not the computation that Fredrik reports having completed. Apparently the Pengo project is not only ill-advised, but actually impossible.
- danbruc 13y agoThen we definitely need a bigger universe. ^^
- gosub 13y agoor a faster one
- danbruc 13y agoThe universe is expanding and therefore becoming colder and colder - it should be safe to slowly increase the clock frequency over time.
- wbhart 13y agoThat's so 2004. Nowadays we just increase the number of cores. Unfortunately the string theory landscape only has about 10^500 possible settings, and they are still unable to figure out how to have the cores use a shared state (so that each universe can know which partitions it should be computing in the enumeration).
- duskwuff 13y agoYou seem to be assuming that, to calculate the partitions of a number, it is necessary to actually enumerate every one of those partitions. This is not true.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wbhart 13y agoI'm assuming nothing of the sort. I said to compute "each one of" the partitions, which is a totally different problem to counting them.
- jey 13y agoThis is computing the cardinality (size) of the set of partitions, not enumerating all of its members.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wbhart 13y agoObviously. However, the article talks not only about the cardinality of the set (which has been computed) but about enumerating the set using Hungarian Pengo. As the article already points out artfully that the attempting the latter may be bad for one's health, I decided to point out that it is actually impossible.