On Thu, 19 Jul 2012 13:50:36 -0500, Tim Chase wrote: > On 07/19/12 13:28, Chris Angelico wrote: >> On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 4:20 AM, Tim Chase >> <python.l...@tim.thechases.com> wrote: >>> Sure it terminates...If you don't run out of RAM to represent the >>> number "i" in question, there's also this "heat death of the universe" >>> limit I keep hearing about ;-) >> >> I'd be more worried about the heat death of your computer, it's likely >> to be sooner. How many people have access to a computer that'll still >> be running in ten years, much less a thousand? > > Just putting a maximum bound on the problem, providing a time-frame in > which I can be fairly certain that the program will have terminated. :-)
I'm reminded of Graham's Number, which is so large that there aren't enough molecules in the universe to write it out as a power tower a^b^c^d^..., or even in a tower of hyperpowers a^^b^^c^^d^^... It was the provable upper bound to a question to which experts in the field thought the most likely answer was ... six. (The bounds have since been reduced: the lower bound is now 13, and the upper bound is *much* smaller than Graham's Number but still inconceivably ginormous.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
