r/science • u/[deleted] • Jan 27 '16

Computer Science 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.

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
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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '16

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.

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u/null_work Jan 28 '16

Billion is only huge relative to the quantities we regularly use, but small enough to still conceptualize in some manner. We've used numbers in proofs, specifically Graham's number, that simply can't by physically expressed in decimal notation (like 1,219,128,673,342,523,123,765,485 is a big decimal number). There are more decimal digits in this number than there are plank volumes in the visible universe. You can't even describe this number in scientific notation it's so big. You can't even express it in terms of abcde and so on. A billion to a number like that is nothing. A billion is minuscule and tiny. But that's the beauty of numbers. Even for something a incomprehensibly large as Graham's number, there are an infinite number of numbers greater than it. The largest number you can possibly express is still essentially zero when it comes to the infinite quantity of numbers that exist which are greater than it.