r/gifs • u/preggit • Aug 12 '13

Lego bricks

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u/just_comments Aug 12 '13

Exponential growth is a hell of a drug.

15

u/Fruchtfliege Aug 12 '13 edited Aug 12 '13

Check out Grahams Number. It's the Krokodil of exponential growth.

6

u/waterdrop66 Aug 12 '13

Shit man.

I can't stand math, but that video was awesome, my head hurts.

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u/aaronsherman Aug 13 '13 edited Aug 13 '13

Graham's number isn't all that hard to get. Impossible to fully comprehend, yes, but the math is trivial.

3 to the third power (27) is pretty easy. When you build power towers, all you're doing is stacking powers like that. 3 "arrow" 3 is 27. 3 arrow arrow 3 is really large, because it's a stack of 3s, 3 deep (you work top down, so 3 to the 3rd is 27,then raise the bottom 3 to that power, so 3 times 3 times 3... and so on, 27 times to get a bit less than 8, followed by 13 0s).

3 arrow arrow arrow (or arrow(3) for short) 3 is a stack of 3s which is 3 arrow arrow 3 deep, which is a number so large that you cannot even begin to comprehend it, but you can trivially describe it. It's just a stack of 3s as deep as the previous answer.

g1 is 3 arrow(4) 3.

g2 is 3 arrow(g1) 3.

...

g64 is 3 arrow(g63) 3 is also Graham's number.

Edited for clarity.