9 ms·

The magic of exponential growth: fun with Planck times

• wcoenen 12y ago
  For another example, 2^64 micrometer is more than 100 astronomical units. So in a game like Kerbal Space Program you could very accurately store the position of everything with 64-bit integers in a single coordinate system. (They actually use floating point though and hacked around all the resulting problems.)
  • TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
    To be fair, that's because the underlying engine used by KSP uses floating-point. It actually uses single-precision floating-point, which Squad hacked around, but that is another matter. Personally, I think we should go to 128-bit registers and just treat (almost) everything as integer-valued (and often unique! Don't worry about PID reuse - just increment the counter. It'll "never" overflow.), but that's another matter.
• cookingrobot 12y ago
  The growth curve here is more than exponential 2^n, it's 2^2^n. Unlike the parable of getting twice as many grains of rice for each subsequent square on a chess board, this pattern also progresses twice as many squares each turn.
  • NAFV_P 12y ago
    > The growth curve here is more than exponential 2^n, it's 2^2^n. I am a bit confused as to what you mean. 2^2^n is still classified as an exponential function.