-- Posted by shadowpool at 2:47 pm on June 26, 2008 How do you calculate the number of digits in the product of something like 4^187500000 ? -- Posted by fpoon at 2:47 pm on June 26, 2008 still having a hard time with that computer, eh? -- Posted by shadowpool at 2:49 pm on June 26, 2008 Quote: from fpoon at 6:47 pm on June 26, 2008 still having a hard time with that computer, eh? No.  I'm just wondering if I have to reserve gigs or megabytes for the result.  o.0 -- Posted by marshmellowman at 2:51 pm on June 26, 2008 Quote: from shadowpool at 10:49 pm on June 26, 2008 Quote: from fpoon at 6:47 pm on June 26, 2008 still having a hard time with that computer, eh? No. I'm just wondering if I have to reserve gigs or megabytes for the result. o.0 I'm thinking more like yottabytes. =] -- Posted by matto at 2:53 pm on June 26, 2008 infinity -- Posted by shadowpool at 2:57 pm on June 26, 2008 I know there's a way to do this. -- Posted by matto at 3:02 pm on June 26, 2008 There probably is.  I haven't learned it, though.  :(  If you find out, let me know, I'd be interested. -- Posted by xenchantedx at 3:06 pm on June 26, 2008 I have no idea, but why are you trying to figure this out? -- Posted by Event Horizon at 3:08 pm on June 26, 2008 should be to the magnitude of 10^112500000 i believe basically, a 1 with 112,500,000 zeros after it lol -- Posted by GodsFireAngel at 3:15 pm on June 26, 2008 around 11,280,000 digits -- Posted by GodsFireAngel at 3:16 pm on June 26, 2008 probably closer to 11,290,000 in fact -- Posted by Event Horizon at 3:30 pm on June 26, 2008 what formula did you use, I think you are missing a zero -- Posted by shadowpool at 3:33 pm on June 26, 2008 Log(4)*187500000=112,886,248.374 So I'm looking at 107.7MB of digits.  Not too bad! Except I want to raise that result to the 16th power.  For a total of 4^3000000000 which represents the total number of possible combinations of DNA in the human genome.   And that's 1.6GB of digits.  I'm not sure I have enough to ram to calculate that one out.  I'd have to write a specialized program to write the intermediate results to the disk.  :( -- Posted by GodsFireAngel at 3:36 pm on June 26, 2008 yah I am missing a zero, I didn't count the zeros in the question he asked properly 112,880,000- to 112,890,000 no forula, just guesswork. what formula did you use? -- Posted by Event Horizon at 3:37 pm on June 26, 2008 i knew he was missing a zero. you want to calculate the possible combinations of the human genome on your home computer? -- Posted by shadowpool at 3:59 pm on June 26, 2008 Quote: from Event Horizon at 7:37 pm on June 26, 2008 i knew he was missing a zero. you want to calculate the possible combinations of the human genome on your home computer? On my laptop.   I think I might give up.  I just wanted an idea of the number of possibilities.  Now that I know how many digits the number has, calculating it isn't necessary.   Except I then I will have wasted 15 CPU hours calculating 4^187500000. But for all I know, it could take months or years.   -- Posted by Event Horizon at 4:11 pm on June 26, 2008 well now you know how many. the only problem is that our genome is specific in many places, so that the number of possible combinations will decrease as certain spots are locked in place. -- Posted by Bobman21 at 8:16 pm on June 26, 2008 Don't trick yourself into thinking your answer will be even approximately close to the truth.  There are 64 codons, nearly 5% of which are stop codons.  Take into consideration that a protein is defined as a polypeptide of >100 amino acids and therefore 3000 a minimum of 3000 codons, that there are at least 10,000 genes coding for proteins, and that therefore nowhere in the reading frame of these 10,000 proteins can you find a stop codon.  That's only one of the problems... assuming you care that such problems exist.  My guess is that you already know they exist but dont care.  Oh well, my two cents. -- Posted by GodsFireAngel at 5:24 pm on July 1, 2008 It would be intresting to calculate how long such a calclation would take, anyone know how? -- Posted by shadowpool at 5:37 pm on July 1, 2008 Someone with a good computer science education should know how given the formula used in the program--qalc.