There are numbers large enough that no computer in the world can store it. amirite?

And there's infinite quantities of those numbers

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Any finite universe will not be able to store that much data even if you used every single atom as a byte.

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Not with that attitude!

by Any_Sorbet 3 weeks ago

Do those numbers truly exist then? Isn't that what the word infinite actually means?

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Can you ?

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

In fact, the vast majority of numbers fall in that category!

by winonaaltenwert 3 weeks ago

No, there is an infinite amount of numbers between 1 and 2 for example. There is no majority of infinity

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

There are different kinds of infinity, not all are equal and some are larger than others. There are an infinite amount of numbers between 1 and 2, but there has to be twice that amount between 1 and 3 for example. And since the fraction of numbers below the largest possibly stored number is 0% of infinity, the vast, vast majority of numbers is above it.

by winonaaltenwert 3 weeks ago

And yet, a 226 bits are all that are required to store such a large number on the computer. Your computer can store billions of bits. Any number of remotely practical use can be stored accurately in the computer and orders of magnitude larger numbers can be stored if you could reduce the precision.

by Brave_Jump 3 weeks ago

52 factorial, yes. Grahams number, no. Even if you put Grahams number into exponential or logamrithic form, the universe is too small to store it.

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

You can store Grahams number in the form of the words "Grahams number". Or you can store it using up-arrow notation. There's no rule that says only a binary representation is real storage. Data can be stored in more or less verbose forms.

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Well I suppose so, but thats kinda like saying the words "blue whale" store all the info of what a blue whale actually is.

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Not really. A blue whale can physically be stored in an ocean. The words "Grahams number" (or the up-arrow) stores all the information about what grahams number is like the symbols "63" or "111111" store all the information about what the number sixty three is. For the last two they only make sense if you know decimal or binary already. For the first two they only make sense if you know the term Grahams number or you know how up-arrow notation works already. However you choose to represent a number, it only works for a person or system that can work with that representation system. There is no true physical form of any number that you can store, there are only arbitrary representations.

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Or you can write it ( 10 - 1 ) in base Grahams number

by KeySuspicious 3 weeks ago

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the exact value of Graham's number has no practical use.

by Brave_Jump 3 weeks ago

Who knows? Ramsey theory (the field of math where Graham's number is used) doesn't have practical application now, but so did calculus and complex/imaginary numbers when they were first described

by Mammoth_Telephone 3 weeks ago

For the average person, no none at all. It arose as the upper bound for a problem in the mathematical field of Ramsey Theory. What exactly that means, I have no idea.

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Basically it's a problem that deals with multidimensional objects, combinatorics, and graph theory. Graham's number was the original upper bound for the answer (with the lower bound actually being 6). They actually made it more precise with further proofs (lower bound 13 and upper bound way smaller than Graham's number but still too large to fit in the observable universe)

by Mammoth_Telephone 3 weeks ago

So it was basically a really complex way of saying "pick a number between 6 and... Grahams number."

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Yeah pretty much. What makes Graham's number so famous is that it's the first super large number that's a legit answer to a mathematical question (that's been published) instead of only an exercise to make as big of a describeable number as possible like Rayo's number

by Mammoth_Telephone 3 weeks ago

instead of only an exercise to make as big of a describeable number as possible like Rayo's number Yeh, that was stupid as it's always trivial to come up with a higher number

by Lopsided-Building389 3 weeks ago

Yes, I saw the vsauce video too

by hbradtke 3 weeks ago

Wow

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Even a tiny 512 bit number can hold more values than there are atoms in the universe, so imagine how big a number is that a computer cannot hold.

by elizabeth55 3 weeks ago

There are also numbers so small that no computer can store them.

by ArtistOk 3 weeks ago

laughs in ieee 754 (negative infinity)

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

The highest number that you can count to is still closer to zero than to infinity

by Small-Share-4289 3 weeks ago

There are computers large enough no numbers could store them.

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

The word "store" is sort of ambiguous. The meaning of anything stored in a computer depends how you interpret it. Fundamentally a computer is just a physical object that's in particular state at any moment. Computers store numbers in many different ways, so if you can specify a number unambiguously in any sort of notation then you can store that in a computer, and potentially manipulate it there.

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

most numbers are so large no comouter can store it.

by Electronic-Dig-398 3 weeks ago

…well, yeah there are numbers so large that if you lined up a googol universes and each quark in each universe represented 10 digits you couldn't fit them. and then there are numbers 100000000 times the size of those. numbers never end, you can always just add one more. so obviously there are numbers large enough that they can't be stored on a computer

by Smooth-Jeweler-5083 3 weeks ago

I don't believe you. Name just one

by Ardelladavis 3 weeks ago

Proof: suppose the largest number we can store is N. Add 1 Now you have a larger number than we can ever store.

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Correct, and indeed different programming languages set maximums. For example in JavaScript Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER is (253 – 1) or 9007199254740991 If you're storing the number as text (not as a numeric value) then it can be a much larger number. Its just limited by the amount of disc space. You can write a novel that is one big number and not even scratch the surface of a computer's capacity.

by Due-Acanthisitta 3 weeks ago

Indeed.. they measured my pp, but now have no idea where to store the measurement results 😕

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

There's a really easy yo mamma joke here

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Numbers aren't real. They only happen if you imagine them. So - yes, but no there aren't.

by edach 3 weeks ago

Know what this means but there's no a priori knowledge beyond that which we think our minds are, and the universe doesn't even care that we have them. Perception schmerception, basically. 95% of the universe is an informatic darkness that by virtue of philosophical weight is more real than any numbers we can try to use to describe it. All we can do is ignore this, however.

by edach 3 weeks ago

Considering they're are infinite numbers between 1 and 2, I agree

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

Tell me one of those numbers and I'll prove this wrong

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

That's Graham's number for you.

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

There are things called galactic algorithms that are known to be the most efficient way of doing particular calculations, but only on numbers larger than the atomic count of the observable universe.

by Antone91 3 weeks ago

Prove it. I dare you to type it out right here.

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

There are infinitely many numbers. There are also infinitely many numbers between every number a computer can store. Infinite infinities!

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

True, but they can store descriptions of such numbers. Eg. "One with a trillion zeroes", "a googalplex squared".,

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago

I dont believe you. Show me one example!

by Anonymous 3 weeks ago