This thread originates from the XKCD forums, and I've introduced it to another forum already.
Over at those forums, it's still a decently active topic, having gone on for two years strong now. It eventually went from a forum game topic to a topic that involved godlike amounts of mathematics in comparing numbers, that no mere mortal could understand. Any naive entry into the topic was shot down mercilessly with "If you can express it like that, you're ordinals of magnitude below us". And the freaky part? They were right.
The point of this thread is to create a number that is, quite simply, larger than the next person's.
The rules, in case it gets mathematical:
Over at those forums, it's still a decently active topic, having gone on for two years strong now. It eventually went from a forum game topic to a topic that involved godlike amounts of mathematics in comparing numbers, that no mere mortal could understand. Any naive entry into the topic was shot down mercilessly with "If you can express it like that, you're ordinals of magnitude below us". And the freaky part? They were right.
The point of this thread is to create a number that is, quite simply, larger than the next person's.
The rules, in case it gets mathematical:
- The number must be finite. Nothing like "Infinity + 1".
- The number must be computable. So nothing like "your mom's weight in pounds", or any use of the Busy Beaver function.
- The number must be well-defined. So nothing like "a bazillion" or "your mom's weight in pounds Troy".
- The number must have an explicit formula. That means, nothing like "The largest value of n for which n satisfies some condition" or "TREE(7)", which I know is mind-bogglingly huge.
- The number must not use the previous number as a base. So no "Your number + 1" kind of stuff. That's spam.