[FOM] Potgieter on hypercomputation

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Vladimir Sazonov wrote:

> Even if anything was changed in physics since that time when I read
> in a Feynman book that (a number even much less than) 2^1000 is bigger
> than the number of electrons in the whole Universe,

And how can we be sure what is the extend of the whole universe?
And what's outside the whole universe? These are not just metaphysical
questions...

> I think that the number of electrons in our galaxy is still considered
> as smaller than this number. Anyway, this is more than enough to consider
> that this is infinity for practical (say, contemporary digital)
> computations, and this is the only physical "fact" of such kind
> that I need to rely on when I say that 2^1000 is infinity.

Well, if your run on your machine the following simple Perl script:

use bigint;
print 2**1000;

you will get almost immediately the following output on your screen:

1071508607186267320948425049060001810561404811705533607443750388370351
0511249361224931983788156958581275946729175531468251871452856923140435
9845775746985748039345677748242309854210746050623711418779541821530464
7498358194126739876755916554394607706291457119647768654216766042983165
2624386837205668069376

So, is this infinity?
A.S.

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*Apostolos Syropoulos                                          *
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