Comment by Sohcahtoa82

4 years ago

They can go large enough for anything that matters.

A quick Google says there's an estimate of 10^78 to 10^82 atoms in the universe. That number would be able to be stored in well under 300 bits.

Universe is tiny compared to mathematics and software, even simply RSA keys are already 2048bit.

Lots of problems suffer from 'combinatorial explosion' [1].

I recently learned about the Archimedes's cattle problem, the solution is of order 10^206544 [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27s_cattle_problem