On Sat, 27 Oct 2007 10:24:41 +0200, Hendrik van Rooyen wrote: > So 0.002625**200000 is a number so small that its about as close as you > can practically get to bugger-all, as it is less than 10 ** -400000, and > more than 10**-600000
If you read the rest of the thread, you'll see I give a much more accurate estimate. It's approaching 10**-520000. > Now I have heard rumours that there are approximately 10**80 elementary > particles in the universe, so this is much less than one of them, even > if my rumour is grossly wrong. > > A light year is of the order of 9.46*10**18 millimetres, and no human > has ever been that far away from home. Call it 10**19 for convenience. > So your number slices the last millimetre in a light year into more than > 10**399981 parts. Numbers like 10**520000 (the reciprocal of the product found) is a perfectly reasonable number if you're dealing with (say) permutations. Admittedly, even something of the complexity of Go only has about 10**150 possible moves, but Go is simplicity itself compared to (say) Borges' Library of Babel or the set of all possible genomes. It's not even what mathematicians call a "large number" -- it can be written using ordinary notation of powers. For large numbers that can't be written using ordinary notation, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_number http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html For instance, Ackermann's Sequence starts off quite humbly: 2, 4, 27 ... but the fourth item is 4**4**4**4 (which has 10,154 digits) and the fifth can't even be written out in ordinary mathematical notation. Calculating numbers like 10**520000 or its reciprocal is also a very good exercise in programming. Anyone can write a program to multiply two floating point numbers together and get a moderately accurate answer: product = X*Y # yawn But multiplying 200,000 floating point numbers together and getting an accurate answer somewhere near 10**-520000 requires the programmer to actually think about what they're doing. You can't just say: A,T,C,G = (0.35, 0.30, 0.25, 0.10) product = map(operator.mul, [A*T*C*G]*200000) and expect to get anywhere. Despite my fear that this is a stupid attempt by the Original Poster's professor to quantify the old saw about evolution being impossible ("...blah blah blah hurricane in a junk yard blah blah Concorde blah blah blah..."), I really like this homework question. -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
