JAWZ and scientific numbers

David R. Conrad (drc@adni.net)
Wed, 7 Oct 1998 08:04:36 -0400 (EDT)

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Anonymous replied to Enzo Michelangeli:
> >...and what exactly is a "scientific number", and when was
> >the last of them "defined"? Or the first, for that matter?
> >;-)
>
> First, googolplex is a well defined scientific number
> (10^(10^100)), which is much larger than 2^4096.

I think they're talking about "billion", "trillion", etc[1].

"Novemtrigintillion" is the biggest such term I've been able to find, and
one novemtrigintillion is about 2^399, much smaller that 2^4096. (And
4096 bits, as many have pointed out, is an utterly ludicrous size for a
symmetric encryption key.)

And they did get the number of commas in 2^4096 right, according to[2]:

echo "comma(2^4096)" |bc comma.b |perl -nle '$x+=tr/,//d; END {print $x;}'

> Some of the customers seem pretty clueless:
>
> "Says Jim Fish, chief operating officer at Axion Internet
> Communication Inc., `One hundred twenty-eight-bit encryption
> has already been broken, and I don't think breaking 256-bit
> is too far down the road.'"

This is what really worries me. This quote seems designed to scare people
away from e.g. Netscape and into the JawsTech camp. And, when it is
inevitably pointed out to be BS, they can conveniently claim that, "We
didn't say that; some schmoe at some ISP said it."

Footnotes:

[1]: Taken from an implementation of number(1):

char *ten3[] = {
  "", "thousand", "million", "billion", "trillion", "quadrillion",
  "quintillion", "sextillion", "septillion", "octillion", "nonillion",
  "decillion", "undecillion", "dodecillion", "tredecillion",
  "quattuordecillion", "quintdecillion", "sexdecillion", "septendecillion",
  "octodecillion", "novemdecillion", "vigintillion", "unvigintillion",
  "dovigintillion", "trevigintillion", "quattuorvigintillion",
  "quintvigintillion", "sexvigintillion", "septenvigintillion",
  "octovigintillion", "novemvigintillion", "trigintillion",
  "untrigintillion", "dotrigintillion", "tretrigintillion",
  "quattuortrigintillion", "quintrigintillion", "sextrigintillion",
  "septentrigintillion", "octotrigintillion", "novemtrigintillion"
};

[2]: comma.b, probably not very efficiently or elegantly implemented:

define comma(x) {
  auto l, r, g, y;

  if (x < 0) {
    print "-";
    x = -x;
  }
  l = length(x);
  if (l < 5) return (x);
  r = x%1000;
  x /= 1000;
  l = y = 0;
  while (x > 999) {
    y = 1000*y+x%1000;
    x /= 1000;
    l += 1;
  }
  print x, ",";
  while (l) {
    g = y%1000;
    if (g < 100) print "0";
    if (g < 10) print "0";
    print g, ",";
    y /= 1000;
    l -= 1;
  }
  if (r < 100) print "0";
  if (r < 10) print "0";
  return (r);
}

Regards,

David R. Conrad <drc@adni.net>

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