Memorillion and Quadrimemorillion
Thursday, November 15th, 2007What are these? These are names of the number of possible unique complete memory dumps when address space is 32 bit and 64-bit correspondingly:
256232 and 256264
The first of them can be approximated by 101010
This idea came to me after I learnt about the so called “immense number” proposed by Walter Elsasser. This number is so big that its digits cannot be listed because there is not enough particles in observable Universe to write them.
Certainly one memorillion is more than one googol 10100 but it requires only approx. 1010 particles in ideal case to list its digits and therefore not an immense number. It is however far less than one googolplex 1010100.
Consider a complete memory dump with bytes written in hexadecimal notation:
0x50414745554d500f000000ce0e00000090...
This number has more than 8 billion digits… And it is one possible number out of memorillion of them. So one memorillion in hexadecimal notation is just
0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF... + 1
where we have 2*232 ‘F’ symbols written sequentially. One quadrimemorillion has 2*264 ‘F’ symbols.
Also the question about the number of possible crash dumps can be considered as Microsoft interview style question when you have possible candidates and you want to assess their ability to think out of the box and handle large numbers.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
