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Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

www.scottaaronson.com Essays & writing Essays & articles Mathematics & science Class of 2015-02 Hall of Fame
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Resurfaced independently across 15 calendar years, with breakout response in 3 of them.

submissions
28
submitters
28
observed span
2007–2025
peak thread · 145 comments
223 pts
latest 20+ return · 2020-01-21
100 pts

Submission timeline

2007–2026

One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.

First comments on top threads

HN comment order

When I was around 14 years old I was baby sitting a kid who was 3 or 4 or something. He came up to me and said "I bet I can say a bigger number than you." clearly proud of what he had just learnt in preschool. I accepted the challenge, he took a deep breath and said "Five hundred!", so I said "Five hundred and one". He looked determined and said "Ok then! Five hundred and fifty hundred and…

“Who can name the bigger number? Whoever has the deeper paradigm.” In 2001, David Moews ran a BIGNUM BAKEOFF competition on the comp.lang.c newsgroup, where each entry had to be a C program (512 non-whitespace characters or fewer) returning a number from main(). The winner is the program that returns the largest number, assuming an arbitrarily-large int type. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thr... After reading Scott Aaronson's wonderful essay, you won't be surprised to hear that the…

I was given this test when I was 13 by my grade 8 teacher. I wrote something along the lines of: (7)^(7^(7^(9^(9 ... )))))) after realizing about second into the challenge that the extra time taken to draw a 9 vs a 7 was worth it. To my surprise, when we got back from lunch I was told that there was a tie for first place. I thought "how could this possibly be?" It turned out that the way the…

I would've said graham's number! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number

jiggity·12-point thread·

The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.

Breakout years
3

100+ points or 50+ comments

Total points
614

reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking

Total comments
309

reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking

Every submission

DateTitle as submittedByPointsComments
2007-08-28Who Can Name the Bigger Number?nickb80
2009-02-24Who can name the bigger number?bhiggins30
2009-03-13Big (and non-computable) Numbersbcater91
2009-11-19Who can name the bigger number?EricBurnett121
2010-07-22Who Can Name the Bigger Number?First breakoutthisisnotmyname13268
2010-12-20Who Can Name the Bigger Number?shawndumas6831
2011-05-10Who can name the bigger number?daoudc93
2013-05-04Who Can Name the Bigger Number?barredo51
2013-07-20Who Can Name the Bigger Number?diziet10
2013-10-14Who Can Name the Bigger Number?llambda10
2013-12-25Who Can Name the Bigger Number? (1999)dpf20
2014-03-12Who Can Name the Bigger Number?dexen20
2015-02-16Who Can Name the Bigger Number?Hall induction · Best threadjeremynixon223145
2016-04-29Who Can Name the Bigger Number?yoha44
2016-05-18Who Can Name the Bigger Number?pje10
2016-08-04Who can name the bigger number? (1999)fbrusch30
2016-10-15Who Can Name the Bigger Number?cares20
2017-04-28Who Can Name the Bigger Number?fossuser20
2017-10-24Who Can Name the Bigger Number?ZeljkoS20
2018-03-22Who can name the bigger number?blowski20
2018-11-22Who Can Name the Bigger Number?signa1132
2019-07-21Who Can Name the Bigger Number?tosh20
2020-01-21Who Can Name the Bigger Number? (1999)Latest 20+ point returnlelf10043
2022-03-11Who Can Name the Bigger Number?graderjs109
2022-11-27Who Can Name the Bigger Number? (1999)yamrzou10
2023-12-19Who Can Name the Bigger Number?MrJagil21
2025-03-30Who Can Name the Bigger Number?hydrolox20
2025-07-17Who Can Name the Bigger Number?virgildotcodes30