this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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I got 38x with 117 billion total people. Not sure where OC got their number, but it's kind of in the ballpark, so maybe it was just shitty mental math.
getting correct within a factor of 2 after a 42-fold exponentiation would be amazingly good mental math
The easiest way would be to say 117 billion is ~2^37 because 2^[7, 10, 20] are 128, 1024, and about a million (1024*1024), so multiplying those all together gives a little over 128 billion, which is pretty close to 117 billion. So, 2^42/2^37=2^5=32. Pretty close, all mental math. Granted, it does require you to either memorize or compute powers of 2 up to 10.
I made a typo and used 177 b.