Given time, this will output a bigger number, and it is only 48 bits:

   B0 39      mov al,'9'     //load character '9' to AL
   CD 29      int 29h        //print to screen
   EB FA      jmp short -6   //go again

▲ jerf 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That is not a number, that is infinity.

The (implicit) rules of the game require the number to be finite. The reason for this is not that infinity is not obviously "the largest" but that the game of "write infinity in the smallest number of {resource}" is trivial and uninteresting. (At least for any even remotely sensible encoding scheme. Malbolge[1] experts may chime up as to how easy it is to write infinity in that language.) So if you like, pretend we played that game already and we've moved on to this one. "Write infinity" is at best a warmup for this game.

(I'm not going to put up another reply for this, but the several people posting "ah, I will cleverly just declare 'the biggest number someone else encodes + 1'" are just posting infinity too. The argument is somewhat longer, but not that difficult.)

[1]: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Malbolge

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lazide 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It isn’t actually infinite since it can only do a finite number of iterations per second (though it would be large!), and there are only a finite number of seconds in the universe (near as we can tell).

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jerf 7 hours ago | parent [-]

This game assumes the computations run to completion on systems that will never run out of resources. No one in this universe will ever compute Ackerman's Number, BB(6), or the final answer given in the post. Computations that never complete are infinite.

If you are playing this game and can't produce a number that doesn't fit in this universe you are probably better suited playing something else. That's just table stakes. If it even qualifies as that. "Inscribe every subatomic particle in the universe with a 9 every planck instant of the universe until the heat death of the universe" doesn't even get off the starting line in games like this.

Another general comment: It feels like a lot of people are really flailing around here, and need to understand this is a game. It has rules. If you change the rules, you are playing a different game. There is nothing wrong with playing a different game. It is just a different game. The game is not immutably written in the structure of the universe, or a mathematical truth, it is a human choice. And there isn't necessarily a "why" to the rules any more than there's a "why" to why the bishop moves as it does in chess. You can, in fact, change that rule. There are thousands of such variants. It's just that you're playing a different game than chess at that point. If you don't want to play the author's game, then that's fine, but it doesn't change the game itself. And proposing different solutions is equivalent to saying that you can win a chess game by just flipping over the board and yelling "I win". You can do that. Perhaps you've even won some game. But whatever game you just won, it isn't chess.

	▲	5 hours ago \| parent [-]
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▲ fjfaase 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe not as big before the processor dies. The numbers that are talked about are unimaginably large, far larger than the number of atoms in the visible universe.

▲ 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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