Re: range of atoms
On 4 Jun 2002, at 10:49, jluethje at gmx.de wrote:
>
> Hello Rob,
>
> you wrote:
>
> > Juergen writes:
> >> On my system, atoms apparently can range from approximately -1.7e308
> >> to +1.7e308. That isn't a small difference (factor 170,000,000):
>
> > The limit will be the same on any system running Euphoria that
> > has IEEE floating-point hardware (all that I know of).
> > I was not being very precise when I said 1e300, but when you consider
> > that there are at most 1e81 atoms (no pun intended) in the universe,
> > it's hard to imagine what use someone could possibly have for
> > numbers like 1e300 or higher. 
>
> An average chess game has about 40 moves (white moves 40 times, black
> moves 40 times). How much different chess games of this length are
> theoretically possible? (I hope, my English is understandable.)
> The answer is: 1.5e128 [1]
> Much more than the estimated number of atoms in the universe!
> ... but much less than 1e300, too.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-932149.html
A report in this week's Nature magazine says Seth Lloyd estimated that
such a computer would have to contain 10 to the 90th bits of information and
perform 10 to the 120th operations on those bits to model the universe in all
its various incarnations since the big bang.
The second figure was drawn from Lloyd's idea that a fundamental particle's
move from one quantum state to another can be seen as a computation, and
that the universe itself can thus be viewed as a giant computer, the Nature
report stated.
Numbers of such size are nearly impossible to comprehend. But the total
information required to model the universe is 10 billion times greater than the
number of elementary particles--neutrons, protons, electrons and photons--in
the universe, the Nature report said. Lloyd could not be reached for
comment.
So in our everyday work modeling all the various parallel universes, we really
need bigger integers, Rob.
Kat
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