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jerfyesterday at 8:56 PM1 replyview on HN

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


Replies

lazideyesterday at 9:20 PM

It isn’t actually infinite since it can only do a finite number of iterations per second (though it would be large!), and there are only a finite number of seconds in the universe (near as we can tell).

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