On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Luke Paireepinart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Is your math correct? That's ridiculously large.
1 year equals 3600 * 24 * 365 makes about 3*10^8 seconds. The universe is about 15.000.000.000 years old, that's about 5*10^17 seconds. With 1 billion combinations per second, each computer does 5*10^26 combinations in that time. There are something like 10^70 or 10^72 particles in the universe, thus N is about 10^100, give or take a factor of thousand or so. N2 is equal to 5*10^17 * N * N, which we will round up to 10^220. N3 by that same calculation will be about 10^460. The unnamed last number that way becomes something like 10^940 (in reality, because of all the rounding up, more like 10^930). That's less than 1/10^600 of 10^1600 - I'd say that's dwarved by any definition of the word. > On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Andre Engels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Daniele <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> >From here >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator#Periodicity >>> and here >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister#Advantages >>> >>> I think it can be argued that the randomness is pretty trustworthy :o) >> >> Nice understatement on that last page - "most applications do not >> require 2^19937 unique combinations (2^19937 is approximately 4.315425 >> × 10^6001)." >> >> If you used every atom in the known universe as a computer, then let >> them turn out a billion combinations a second for the entire time >> since the big bang, and call the number of combination you get then >> N... >> then take N computers turning out N combinations a second for the >> entire time since the big bang, and call the number of combinations >> they turn out N2... >> then take N2 computers turning out N2 combinations a second and call >> the number of combination they turn out in the time since the big bang >> and call that N3... >> then the number of combinations turned out by N3 computers turning out >> N3 combinations per second in the time since the big bang STILL >> dwarves in comparison to that number. >> >> >> -- >> André Engels, [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> _______________________________________________ >> Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org >> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor >> > -- André Engels, [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
