5 Jun
2013
5 Jun
'13
12:26 p.m.
teachable moment and said, Hmm, you have 16 nested do
loops
from 1 to 16. Do you know how many total iterations that is?
The guy whips out his trusty HP45 and starts calculating.
My friend smiles, as he already knows that 16^^16 will not
be computable on the calculator. So, they trudge over to
As an aside, why not?
16^16 = 2^64. We can estimate that. Every 10 powers of 2 is 3 powers of
10. So 2^64 ~= 2^4 * 10^18. Or about 1.6*10^19. According to my HP48 it's
actually 1.845*10^19.
AFAIK the HP45 could handle numbers up to 9.999...*10^99. So the above
calcualtion is well within range.
-tony