What if in Graham’s Number every “3” was replaced by “tree(3)” instead? How big is this number? Greater than Rayo’s number? Greater than every current named number?
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What is "tree(3)"? – Arthur May 21 '17 at 12:26
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http://googology.wikia.com/wiki/TREE_sequence – Goodwin Lu May 21 '17 at 12:27
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1By the way, "every current named number except infinity" makes no sense. Infinity is not a number – Arthur May 21 '17 at 12:31
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ah, alright. Some consider it to be. – Goodwin Lu May 22 '17 at 18:54
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Rayo's number is by design almost certainly larger than anything along these lines you could write down. – Mark S. May 22 '17 at 19:15
4 Answers
No. If you replaced all the $3$'s in the construction of Graham's number with $\operatorname{TREE}(3)$, the resulting number would be smaller than $g_{\operatorname{TREE(3)}}$ where $g_n$ denotes the $n$th number in Graham's sequence with $g_{64}$ being Graham's number. This is much much smaller than $\operatorname{TREE}(4)$, for example.
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Though $\operatorname{TREE}(4)$ is already a good enough upper bound. – Simply Beautiful Art Jan 13 '18 at 13:25
The TREE function grows much much faster than any construction of knuth up arrows. Because of this, inserting the TREE function into Grahams number would yield a number still very close to TREE(3). It would be like trying to create a number larger than a googolplex by adding a 1 on the end. You would be better off inserting Grahams number into TREE instead of the other way around, creating a "TREE's Graham" instead of "Graham's TREE"
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The numbers themselves are already so big that doing that would barely change it at all. It would still be ZERO compared to a number like Rayo's number. Obviously, if doing so really did make it the largest number ever created, why wouldn't people do it earlier?
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No, Rayo's Number is just too big, imagine a Googol symbols in the first order set theory, you cannot express it, why? because even writing down a symbol per Planck time (5.39 x 10^-44 seconds) it would still take about 10^48 years, and another problem is the space, the number of particles in the observable is about 10^80, a Googol is 10^100,and bigger than any named number except infinity, infinity is NOT a number, this number would be bigger than TREE(3), but smaller than TREE(4), which is much bigger than TREE(3), and then if you pick a number like TREE(g(64)), or TREE^TREE(3)(3),(where TREE^2(3) = TREE(TREE(3))) or a number even MUCH bigger than Rayo's Number like FOOT^10(10^100) or Fish Number 7, this "Graham's TREE(3)" wouldn't even be 0 against them.