Daddy, what’s the biggest number?
September 2nd, 2010 creative, technical
Daughter: Daddy, what’s the biggest number?
Daddy: Well, there’s no such thing as the biggest number, they keep going forever, but you know how 10 has 1 zero behind it and 100 has 2 zeros behind it? A googol is 1 with 100 zeros behind it… and a googolplex is 1 with a googol zeros behind it!
Daughter: Can you count to a googolplex?
Daddy: Never ever. Even if you had all the computers in the world counting for a million years you couldn’t even come close.
Daughter: What if they made a googolplex computers?
Daddy: Then it’d be no problem!
Appendix: If you’re like me, you’re wondering just how high could all the world’s computers count in a million years? Given 1 billion computers at 3GHz that’s 109 computers * (3 x 109) cycles * 106 years * 365 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds = 1032, or a third of the way to googol. So 3 million years for a googol. That means 1 with 3 million zeros years to get to googolplex!
4 Comments Add your own
1. Matt Fisher | September 28th, 2010 at 7:37 pm
Underestimated the wait rather drastically, as 10**32 is not 1/3 * 10**100.
2. dave | October 8th, 2010 at 11:03 am
Oops, I guess it should be 1/3 of the magnitude of googol. Much worse than I estimated.
3. Ryan | June 16th, 2011 at 6:48 pm
VERY DRASTICALLY. It would only be one 10*68th or 10*(-68) of the way there! It would take vastly longer than 3,000,000 years, but even if it did take 3 million years to reach a googol it would not take 1 followed by 3 million zeros to reach a googolplex. It would take googolplex divided by googol times 3 million years (3 million years for every google you must count). This is equal to 10*(google-100)x3 million which equals 3×10*((10*100)-100)x10*6 =3×10*((10*100)-94) a 3 followed by (googol-94) zeros incomprehensibly larger than 10*(3×10*6) a 1 followed by 3 million zeros.
4. David | September 2nd, 2011 at 7:01 am
Wrong Ryan. Not sure where you’re getting 10 * (googol - 100)*3 million. It would be googol * 3 million years, assuming it truly took 3 million years to count to a Googol.
I can only assume that you and the author are terribly terribad at math.
If every electron in the universe were converted to a computer that could count 10^20 successions per second, then it would take one second to count to a Googol.
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