ideas-computer-jasper-jasperNumerology

powers of 2

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what bit width for various things?

64-bit is a commonly used width

according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/128-bit , "...there are currently no mainstream general-purpose processors built to operate on 128-bit integers or addresses...".

IPv6 has 128-bit addresses

following that advice to take the current value of something and double it, that suggests that either 256-bit or (2^7 = 128, 2^14 = 16384) 16384-bit is a comfortable maximum.

the number of atoms in the universe is about 10^80, which is around 2^256

this suggests that the max bitwidth should be between 2^8 and 2^256, or between 2^8 and 2^(2^8)

one bit per atom seems a bit much. halving the latter 8, we get 2^(2^4) = 65536 bits, which is 256^2 bits or 8 KiB?. That seems like a very large upper bound already for a bitwidth, when you compare it to 64 bits (8 bytes); it's an increase from 64 bits of a factor of 1024 (2^10); whereas 64 = 2^6, and the increase from 8-bit is only 8.

so 16384 seems better.

or we could even take 2^6 = 64 and double the 6 to get 2^12 = 4096 bits, or 0.5 KiB?