Busy Beaver numbers and the halting problem

[Martin]

Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html

 

this is a fun essay, written by Scott Aaronson when he was an undergraduate at Cornell.

 

After some time at Berkeley, Princeton and the Inst. for Adv. Study, Scott is now at Waterloo University (same place as Lee Smolin, the quantum gravitist). He is an expert in computational complexity with interests in quantum computers and quantum information theory. And runs an occasionally entertaining blog

 

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

 

here e.g. is what he recently posted about the Turing Test for articfical intelligence

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/2006/03/alan-turing-moralist.html

 

So the guy is multifaceted. Check out his essay on REALLY BIG NUMBERS.

It gave me some new ideas, and was fun reading.

[WaR]

Googleplex^zillion!

 

I never knew "zillion" actually had roots in language. I always thought of it as a word for a number that a small child would use. Very informative and fun reading.

 

PS. Long too!

 

Edit: I know NeonBlack, thanks. It is Googol. Damn Google trademark is colonizing my brain!

[NeonBlack]

I don't mean to nitpick but:

I think...

google: a search engine.

googol: a number 10^100