CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

... that can do arbitrarily large numbers... like... a few million didgets long. anyone know where I can get one?

?!

You'll never find a calculator that has that kind of precision, and you won't need one for any practical application. On the other hand, if you simply mean large numbers with truncated precision you should be able to find one easily. Most scientific calculators will allow numbers up to ~10.0^99 although their actual precision (# of digits stored) may vary.

What sort of applications do you need it for? Some calculators come with all kinds of bells and whistles (plotting, matrices, symbolics, etc) which can add to the cost. Personally, I found the Casio fx-6300G to be sufficient for most needs (it's inexpensive and has graphing/programmable capability) and used my desktop computer for more complicated tasks (IOW I used some mathematics software or wrote the program in C).

I know. There are "only" about 10^100 atoms in the universe according to scientists nowadays.

Why do I want it? There was a small challenge on a forum that wondered if someone could answer the following equation (or something much like it):
N = A!^B!^C!^D! ... ^L!^14

where A = 1000!^1000!
B = A!^A!
C = B!^B!
etc.

That'd take a while on paper. I managed to solve for A to about 32 didgets of significant figures, but beyond that... hehe.

The ans

The answer is definately not zero! The trick to the question is not to try and compute it directly. Instead you need to take the logarithm and use the properties of that operation. To get you started

N=A!^B!....L!^14
log N= 14*L!*log(A!^B!...^K!)
=14*L!*K!*....B!*log(A!)

From here on in it should be relatively straightforward.

Technomancer, sometimes you truly are frightening. How old are you?

He is thousan

There's no real way around that unfortunately, given the question. The problem seems designed to test one's patience rather than mathematical insight. There are unfortunately no nifty transformations or identities with which one could easily reduce the problem, so a lot of hand calculation is still required.

technomancer is more wise than oldphil o_O

In truth you know, even with the logs there's no really compact way of writing the answer. You're pretty much restriced to the "power tower" that was used in the original question. The reason is that the actual number is well in excess of a googleplex, which would take more space to write than exists in the known universe.

Edit: with regards to wisdom, I really wouldn't know that. I do know about mathematics though.

Hey, I could get fired up about a Technomancer vs. OldPhil bout. We should set one up, Mr. SP.

indeed so!

Let's see... What style should it be in? An RP type fight, like the bouts for Zelda 27 and Sam*ron, or a test of intelligence? You've been around longer, SP...what do you think?

And hey, Technomancer, are you up to it?