Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

After yet another geek talk with the some younger old geeks (yeap, Diogo and Pita, again!...), the Ackermann function just dropped by. I was just googling about it when I stumbled uppon this great (and funny) essay: Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

The essay starts:

In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces "Eighty-three!" The second, mightily impressed, replies "You win."

And continues saying:

The contest’s results are never quite what I’d hope. Once, a seventh-grade boy filled his card with a string of successive 9’s. Like many other big-number tyros, he sought to maximize his number by stuffing a 9 into every place value. Had he chosen easy-to-write 1’s rather than curvaceous 9’s, his number could have been millions of times bigger. He still would been decimated, though, by the girl he was up against, who wrote a string of 9’s followed by the superscript ⁹⁹⁹. Aha! An exponential: a number multiplied by itself 999 times. Noticing this innovation, I declared the girl’s victory without bothering to count the 9’s on the cards.

And about the Turing Machine goes on:

Set a tape head loose on a sequence of symbols, and it might stop eventually, or it might run forever—like the fabled programmer who gets stuck in the shower because the instructions on the shampoo bottle read "lather, rinse, repeat."

One of my favorites:

Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers.

Hilarious! Please take some time an read the essay. It's pilled with great stories, Computer Science references, gurus and concepts, lots of interesting data, and the writing is just fabulous.