In a similar vein, Frederic Pohl wrote a story ("The Gold at the Starbow's End", 1972) in which some astronauts have been sent to colonize one of the worlds of Alpha Centauri while Earth succumbs to political chaos. The astronauts get very bored and figure out how to use some of the onboard drugs to expand their cognitive abilities, at which point they send a highly compressed message containing all kinds of amazing discoveries back to Earth, something like 53^1736 + 257^982 + 832^4486, but the scientists estimated they wouldn't have enough computing power to figure out the answer for 25 years. I wrote the author when I was a boy about the story and he told me that originally he had intended to have a power tower three levels high, but left it out for the typesetter's sake. On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 7:32 AM, Hans Havermann <gladhobo@bell.net> wrote:
Joerg Arndt: "I computed 9^9^9 in 1999 just for the kick of it."
:) I published the number in 2004:
http://chesswanks.com/seq/n%5En%5En/9%5E9%5E9/
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