logoalt Hacker News

The road to epsilon-zero: Nim always ends, even with infinite ordinals

12 pointsby pavel_lishinlast Tuesday at 12:10 AM3 commentsview on HN

Comments

xelxebartoday at 2:09 AM

Using ordinals to talk about finite numbers gets suprisingly deep real fast.

David Metzler has a series of fun videos called "Ridiculously huge numbers" that goes down the rabbit hole of the fast growing hierarchy.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A50BB9C34AB36B3

BB(n), Rayo's number and friends can get bigger way faster, but they do this uncomputably fast. Launching yourself into arithmetic hyperspace in a controlled way like with the fast growing hierarchy does a much better job of conveying the sheer vastness of finitude.

OP's article got me thinking about Nim with added mechanics that let you get all the way to Feferman–Schütte, hence the above.

linzhangruntoday at 1:13 AM

First glance I thought someone was referring to https://nim-lang.org/

show 1 reply