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Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

132 点作者 thisisnotmyname将近 15 年前

19 条评论

robinhouston将近 15 年前
“Who can name the bigger number? Whoever has the deeper paradigm.”<p>In 2001, David Moews ran a BIGNUM BAKEOFF competition on the comp.lang.c newsgroup, where each entry had to be a C program (512 non-whitespace characters or fewer) returning a number from main(). The winner is the program that returns the largest number, assuming an arbitrarily-large int type.<p><a href="http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thread/1511694ab8570ccc/540218fdfa4b2ab8" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thr...</a><p>After reading Scott Aaronson's wonderful essay, you won't be surprised to hear that the contest was won by a theoretical computer scientist, Ralph Loader. (Second place was taken by Heiner Marxen, who is mentioned in Scott's article in connection with the Busy Beaver problem.)<p>Ralph Loader's remarkable program is at <a href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~suckfish/busy/reduced.c" rel="nofollow">http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~suckfish/busy/reduced.c</a>, and the documented and unmangled version in <a href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~suckfish/busy/busy.tar.gz" rel="nofollow">http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~suckfish/busy/busy.tar.gz</a><p>David Moews' discussion of the entries is at <a href="http://djm.cc/bignum-results.txt" rel="nofollow">http://djm.cc/bignum-results.txt</a>
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Eliezer将近 15 年前
What I'd want to say here is "the largest number nameable using 1000 symbols in second-order logic" (not original, I think someone else won a contest that way). But the fact that someone can ask "Which formulation of second-order logic?" probably defeats this unless you can also, in those fifteen seconds, cite a standard formulation of second-order logic and a standard axiomatization of number in that formulation, otherwise it's an ambiguous specification. HOL is a standard and formal formulation of higher-order logic that I can think of in fifteen seconds, but I wouldn't be able to think of a standard formulation of Peano Arithmetic that was already in HOL.<p>Actually, now that I think of it, "the largest number nameable using 1000 symbols in HOL plus a successor symbol" might work, since you can define addition, multiplication, etc. in higher-order logic using only a successor symbol.<p>Interesting fact: This is a fundamental jump up from first-order logic, which is a fundamental jump up from Busy Beaver, and then once you're there, it's operating at the highest level of abstraction that I know about or have ever heard of. There are things you can do to make that number bigger - picking a different ordinal for the order of logic, recursing over how you get the number of symbols - but they all amount to saying "plus one", and not jumping to a qualitatively different level of abstraction. Once you abstract over second-order logic you are, so far as I know, <i>done</i>.
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ars将近 15 年前
Dup: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408</a> <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=951095" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=951095</a> <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492615" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492615</a> <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514955" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514955</a>
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Jun8将近 15 年前
Surely not every day, but frequently enough, I read a submission and related comments on HN and say to myself, "Ahhh, this is why I continue to come to HN!".<p>This is definitely one of those.
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arethuza将近 15 年前
Graham's Number?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number</a>
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joe_the_user将近 15 年前
One of the fundamental points of Kolmagorov's algorithmic information theory is that the function for the largest number algorithmically representable by n bits of information is incomputable.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity</a>
diziet将近 15 年前
Something like<p>(9||||9)!<p>Using knuth's up arrow notation<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation</a><p>And a factorial for good measure
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exit将近 15 年前
&#62; <i>Be precise enough for any reasonable modern mathematician to determine exactly what number you’ve named, by consulting only your card and, if necessary, the published literature.</i><p>but there isn't enough entropy left before cosmic heat death to evaluate 9^(9^9).
spoonboy将近 15 年前
Just for fun, here's my shot: The number of steps required to compute the solution to the travelling salesman problem for each quark of every subset of every permutation of quarks in the universe in space-time.
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Rhapso将近 15 年前
"The traveling salesman problem asks for the shortest route connecting a set of cities, given the distances between each pair of cities. The rub is that the number of possible routes grows exponentially with the number of cities."<p>Is it just me or does the traveling salesman problem have (cities-1)! solutions? thus it is not exponential? and is in fact far more annoying?
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Avshalom将近 15 年前
2 things<p>1) <a href="http://qntm.org/planar" rel="nofollow">http://qntm.org/planar</a> obviously not the largest number but pretty big.<p>2) <a href="http://www.ephraimkishon.de/en/my_favorite_stories.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.ephraimkishon.de/en/my_favorite_stories.htm</a> The story Jewish Poker is at least one take on the old joke mentioned in the intro, and a fun read.
rw将近 15 年前
Definitely check out his other essays too!
rookie将近 15 年前
a more interesting challenge would be the biggest number using each of the ten digits only once.<p>ready, go.
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dennisgorelik将近 15 年前
It looks like many commentators did not bother to read the full article. Neither did I, but I remember not to use "infinity" and "number of atoms in universe".
lakeeffect将近 15 年前
Put the Factorial, exclamation mark after each exponent.
noonespecial将近 15 年前
/Eagles music, singing/<p>welcome to the hotel David Hilbert...
richieb将近 15 年前
Aleph Null?
buzzblog将近 15 年前
My daughter at bedtime says she's giving me infinity times infinity time infinity kisses. That's the biggest number, I don't care what any of you math whizzes have to say about the matter. ... OK, let's call it the best not the biggest.
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tman将近 15 年前
a1 = 10^10<p>a2 = a1^a1<p>...<p>a_n = a_(n-1)^a_(n-1)<p>My number is a_(a_(10^10))