The magic of exponential growth: fun with Planck times

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7 pointslelf4 comments

For another example, 2^64 micrometer is more than 100 astronomical units. So in a game like Kerbal Space Program you could very accurately store the position of everything with 64-bit integers in a single coordinate system. (They actually use floating point though and hacked around all the resulting problems.)

To be fair, that's because the underlying engine used by KSP uses floating-point. It actually uses single-precision floating-point, which Squad hacked around, but that is another matter.

Personally, I think we should go to 128-bit registers and just treat (almost) everything as integer-valued (and often unique! Don't worry about PID reuse - just increment the counter. It'll "never" overflow.), but that's another matter.

The growth curve here is more than exponential 2^n, it's 2^2^n.

Unlike the parable of getting twice as many grains of rice for each subsequent square on a chess board, this pattern also progresses twice as many squares each turn.

> The growth curve here is more than exponential 2^n, it's 2^2^n.

I am a bit confused as to what you mean. 2^2^n is still classified as an exponential function.

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