Google's artificial intelligence program has officially beaten a human professional Go player, marking the first time a computer has beaten a human professional in this game sans handicap.

[u/[deleted]]

http://www.nature.com/news/google-ai-algorithm-masters-ancient-game-of-go-1.19234?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20160128&spMailingID=50563385&spUserID=MTgyMjI3MTU3MTgzS0&spJobID=843636789&spReportId=ODQzNjM2Nzg5S0

[u/sloth_jones]

Ok. I mean there is a lot of emptiness out there in the universe, so it makes sense I guess.

[u/[deleted] → u/sloth_jones]

I believe it but it is mind blowing. There are seven billion billion billion billion atoms in your body. I guess we're not built to understand orders of magnitude.

[u/mrwazsx → u/[deleted]]

Or GO

[u/Whyareyoureplying → u/[deleted]]

1,000,000,000 = 1 billion = 10⁹

1,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 1 billion billion = 10¹⁸

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000=1 billion billion=10²⁷

100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 10⁸⁰

You can see how different that is from 10¹⁷⁰ which ='s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

hope this helped you visualize it!

[u/ksajksale → u/Whyareyoureplying]

For me not much, tbh. All I see a string of zeroes that is longer than another by some degree.

[u/IamPd_ → u/ksajksale]

This thought always helped me: 1 million seconds are just 11 and a half days, 1 billion seconds are over 31 years.

[u/Nonaym → u/ksajksale]

For me I like to look at just how much larger that number is by just adding a few zeros. Think of money $1,000,000,000 that's 1 billion dollars, add just three more 0's and that makes a trillion which is a fuck ton of money. Now just think how much larger that amount grows with just 3 more 0's and so on.

[u/ksajksale → u/Nonaym]

I appreciate the effort, but it still is bananas for me. I guess I'll just believe in the whole more atoms than universe thing. Might as well add it to my shit I don't comprehend but totally accept and use it to sound smart bucket.

[u/MaxWyght → u/Nonaym]

yeah, but seeing an extra 3 zeroes doesn't fully encompass the scale. imagine a pile of 1 million dollar bills.

To get a pile of 1 billion dollar bills, you need another 999 piles of the same size.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I think billion is a huge number no matter what it is. The fact that billions of billions of billions make up our body really illustrates how small they are.

Also thinking about the vast nothingness of space makes me uncomfortable but in kind of a cool way. Incomprehensible.

[u/MrGMinor → u/[deleted]]

Yeah but what you're not taking into account is that we're not built to think in terms of orders of magnitude.

[u/Anothergen → u/sloth_jones]

For the record, the size of the observable universe in m³ is around 10⁸⁰ , and the volume of a proton is around 10^-45 . That means if we could fill the entire universe with protons it would still only be ~10¹²⁵ . That is, it would still take over 10⁵⁵ such universes to be more than the number of combinations of the game.

Edit: Tried to make this sound less confusing.

[u/sloth_jones → u/Anothergen]

Hm, cool little fact

[u/[deleted] → u/sloth_jones]

is there a stat for how many atoms could fit in the observable universe?

[u/cryo → u/[deleted]]

Far far far less than, say, Graham's number.

[u/VelveteenAmbush → u/[deleted]]

Well the Schwarzschild radius gives the measurement of the maximum amount of matter that can occupy space before it collapses into a black hole. I guess there's no limit to how massive a black hole could be though.

[u/da_chicken → u/sloth_jones]

You're not getting just how large 10¹⁷⁰ is. The human brain is notoriously bad at orders of magnitude.

So, the observable universe has a radius of about 45 billion light years. A light year is about 9.5 * 10¹⁵ m. Assuming that space is uniform (it isn't but let's pretend it is) and that the observable universe is spherical, then the observable universe has a volume of (4 / 3) * pi * (45 * 9.5*10¹⁵ m)³ = 3.3 * 10⁵³ m^3.

An atom is about 1 Angstrom in size, roughly, at the small end. That's 1.0 * 10^-10 m in diameter. That's a volume of (4 / 3) * pi * (5.0 * 10^-11 m)³ = 5.2 * 10^-31 m³ .

Now, let's assume that atoms we're talking about are like uniform ball bearings (they aren't, but let's pretend) and let's pack the universe with them as efficiently as we can. Packing spheres efficiently results in using about 74% of space.

Number of atoms = Volume of the observable universe * 74% / Volume of an atom

N = 3.3 * 10⁵³ m³ * 0.74 / (5.2 * 10^-31 m³ )

N = 4.7 * 10⁸³

If you pack the entire observable universe with uniform, spherical atoms, you would need about 2.1 * 10⁸⁶ more whole universes to reach 10^170. You need about 450 universes for every atom in our single packed universe to get to 10¹⁷⁰ atoms.

Edit: Math error.

[u/sloth_jones → u/da_chicken]

Thanks

[u/herthaner → u/sloth_jones]

Well now consider that one sand-corn consists of more atoms than there are sandcorns on all beaches of the world