Re:A googol-to-one gear ratio [video]
by xwdv on Friday March 06, 2020 @07:31PM
(#22508763)
If you made this in a physics engine could you get the last gear to spin in a reasonable time and not break the simulation?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:A googol-to-one gear ratio [video]
by autonoshitbox on Friday March 06, 2020 @11:54PM
(#22509821)
Sure, just do something with Fourier transforms. Okay, it's not completely accurate, but most simulations aren't anyway.
In fact, I can simulate this in text form with no floating-point or number theory issues at all. Here's the simulation:
> For every 10^100 turns of the first gear, the last gear will move about one full turn.
Re:A googol-to-one gear ratio [video]
by banana_giraffe on Friday March 06, 2020 @08:33PM
(#22509088)
Nope. Even if your physics engine could deal with the rotation of the first gear in one "unit", and batch the rotation of that gear a million times in a "super unit", then calculate a million "super units" each second, it would still take longer than the universe has been around, by 10^70 times, to complete one rotation of the final gear.
Only if you're okay with some sort of extreme fast-forward mechanism (which seems like cheating), since even if you turned the first gear once per CPU cycle you'd still be spending about 10^90 seconds to turn the last gear once. There's otherwise no problem with representing the state of the simulation itself; a googol only takes 333 bits to represent.