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dmitrygr • yesterday at 8:29 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Given time, this will output a bigger number, and it is only 48 bits:

   B0 39      mov al,'9'     //load character '9' to AL
   CD 29      int 29h        //print to screen
   EB FA      jmp short -6   //go again

Replies

jerf • yesterday at 8:56 PM

That is not a number, that is infinity.

The (implicit) rules of the game require the number to be finite. The reason for this is not that infinity is not obviously "the largest" but that the game of "write infinity in the smallest number of {resource}" is trivial and uninteresting. (At least for any even remotely sensible encoding scheme. Malbolge[1] experts may chime up as to how easy it is to write infinity in that language.) So if you like, pretend we played that game already and we've moved on to this one. "Write infinity" is at best a warmup for this game.

(I'm not going to put up another reply for this, but the several people posting "ah, I will cleverly just declare 'the biggest number someone else encodes + 1'" are just posting infinity too. The argument is somewhat longer, but not that difficult.)

[1]: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Malbolge

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fjfaase • yesterday at 11:50 PM

Maybe not as big before the processor dies. The numbers that are talked about are unimaginably large, far larger than the number of atoms in the visible universe.