Why do we have the number "googol" (not google)? (1 with 100 zeros...)

[Jeremiah Johnson]

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, oh look a bird, 7, 8, 9, 10... Sorry... I have ADHD. ^_^

[Denman]

it would therefore not be possible to write down or store the digits of a googolplex in decimal notation, even if all the matter in the known universe were converted into paper and ink or disk drives.

i dare you to write a script and try to fill your hard drives with lots of 0's in a text file

[anna~marie]

haha so since I am bored... presenting "1 with 100 zeros..."

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

[Dan Zollman]

Originally Posted by anna~marie

haha so since I am bored... presenting "1 with 100 zeros..."

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Haha...you messed up; you only have 97 zeros there! (I'm sure you just knew that someone would take the time to count)

[anna~marie]

bah!!!
i edited it, sure that i was three over..... *scowl*

[Nick Bailey]

heres a site where some wrote a script to count from 1 to a googol. Needless to say they've barely scratched the surface. http://www.procrastinators.org/googolplex.html

[Dan Zollman]

Originally Posted by anna~marie

bah!!!
i edited it, sure that i was three over..... *scowl*

Actually, you're right; it was 100 zeros in the first place. I couldn't resist the temptation to do that.

[Leo M]

The name “googol” was devised just after WWI by Milton Sirotta, the nine-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. It was created to illustrate the difference between a large number and infinity. Other than that, it has no particular use or significance. There are some interesting properties to this number :

It is approximately equal to factorial seventy – 70!

It has only two prime factors, 2 and 5.

In binary, it takes up 333 bits.

A regular polygon that has a googol of sides, and is 10E27 times the size of the known universe, would still appear to be a circle even if we looked on the scale of a Planck length – 1.616E-35 meters.

The number googol is larger than the number of particles in the known universe, estimated at between 10E72 to 10E87.

The “Google” internet search engine was named after the googol, but they made a spelling error, which turned out OK because google.com was available and googol.com was not. The Google headquarters is known as the “Googleplex”, after the number googolplex, which is 10Egoogol, or one followed by a googol of zeroes.

As far as printing out a googolplex, here is an interesting statement by Frank Pilhofer that it can be mathematically proven that it is useless to try to do it:

“However, this program is completely useless, and it is possible to mathematically prove its uselessness. The proof first introduces two corollaries.

Corollary 1
The computing power of microchips doubles every second year.
This statement is also known as "Moore's Law", named after the Intel Co-Founder. It has been empirically shown to be correct for the last 30 years. Actually, the original statement reads "every 18 months," I'm being a little more conservative than that. If you think that the value of two years is incorrect, invent another one. It doesn't make a lot of difference.
Corollary 2
At today's speed, the program will run for 3.125*10^85 years.
The fastest available desktop computers of today will run the program at a speed that allows the printing of about 10 to the power of 7 digits per second. The average year has roughly 3.2*10^7 seconds, so this machine will print about 3.2*10^14 digits per year. We conclude that this machine will need 3.125*10^85 years to finish printing Googolplex.
We now combine these two corollaries in the following mental experiment. Imagine that you do not start the program now, but that you wait two years before starting it. Corollary 1 states that the processor power will have doubled by then, therefore halfing the running time calculated by corollary 2 to 1.5625*10^85 years.
The delayed program that's being started in two years therefore overtakes the program started today, and finishes its computation 1.5625*10^85 minus 2 years ahead of the undelayed program.
Of course, this makes it useless to run the program today, because it would only reproduce the already existing output of the program that's being started in the future. We have therefore shown that the program is useless today.
We complete the proof by iteratively using the above mental experiment on itself. It is easily understandable that it doesn't make any sense running the program as long as the computation time exceeds 4 years. A simple calculation shows that this will be not be the case for the next 282 "life cycles", that is, 564 years.
Until then, we can always overtake computation by running the same program two years later and therefore brand an undelayed program execution as useless.
We can summarize our thoughts in the following, now proven, sentence:
The program is useless today, and will be useless for the next 564 years. qed.
Lucas Watson (lwatkins@scri.fsu.edu) took a different approach, and pointed out that my program will be useless even in a million years, simply because there isn't enough matter to print a Googolplex on (and this fact is unlikely to change). According to him, this idea originated on Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV show.
But who said we have to print Googolplex in decimal? If we switch to base Googolplex, you can print it simply as 10. (suggested by Paul Dourish dourish@europarc.xerox.com). ”

[anna~marie]

Originally Posted by worldbringer

Actually, you're right; it was 100 zeros in the first place. I couldn't resist the temptation to do that.

no fair!!! *pout*

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Denman

i dare you to write a script and try to fill your hard drives with lots of 0's in a text file

When I read "Since a googol plus 1 is the number of digits in a googolplex, it would therefore not be possible to write down or store the digits of a googolplex in decimal notation, even if all the matter in the known universe were converted into paper and ink or disk drives." I doubted that was true. So I broke out calc.exe and went to work.

1E1000 / 8 = 1.25E999 bytes
1.25E999 / 1024= 1.220703125E996 megabytes
1.220703125E996 / 1024 = 1.1920928955078125E993 gigabytes
1.1920928955078125E993 / 1024 = 1.16415321826934814453125E990 terabytes
1.16415321826934814453125E990 / 1024 = 1.136868377216160297393798828125E987 petabytes
1.136868377216160297393798828125E987 / 1024 = 1.1102230246251565404236316680908E984 exabytes
1.1102230246251565404236316680908E984 / 1024 = 1.0842021724855044340074528008699E981 zettabytes
1.0842021724855044340074528008699E981 / 1024 = 1.0587911840678754238354031258496E978 yottabytes

Assuming 1 out of every 6 people in this world has a hard drive, with an average of 40GiB space... that means altogether there is 2,684,354,560,000,000,000 bits of space. That is 298.023223876953125 exabytes.

So I've come to the conclusion that Wikipedia was right, and I just wasted about 20 minutes of my life. Why must I question the all-knowing Wikipedia?