[Imrahil]

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PALO ALTO, Calif. — An international team of mathematicians has cracked a 120-year-old puzzle that researchers say is so complicated that its handwritten solution would cover the island of Manhattan.

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When stored in highly compressed form on a computer hard drive, the solution takes up 60 gigabytes

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did this jar with anyone else? More like one city block would be my guess.

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60GB of highly compressed TEXT is a lot of numbers and letters imo.

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60 billion letters and numbers? I have an A4 page with some scribbles on it, definitely not tightly packed, say 600 characters, 1000 characters to a square foot. 10k characters to a square metre. 1 million characters in 100 square metres. 60 billion characters in 6,000,000 square metres, or 6 square kilometres.

I guess it's closer to Manhattan-size (60 square kilometres) than I thought, but still off by an order of magnitude. If the solution was written in binary it would be pretty close to accurate.

It just seemed like too much, everybody's hard drive fits 60GB+.

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But it could be so compressed that there are 500 thousand million characters instead of 60 thousand million.