On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Andre Engels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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.
Oh, wait, I had to compare to 10^6001 instead of 10^1600... Which means I could have gone on to N6 instead of N4. >> 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] > -- André Engels, [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
