Book Review: Search and Construct

An enormous quantity may be termed “astronomical,” referencing the huge span of time since the Big Bang (∼10¹⁷ s), the huge size of the universe (∼10²⁷ m), or the huge amount of material in the observable universe (∼10⁸⁰ atoms). Yet these quantities pale into insignificance compared to those generated by combinatorics, where numbers are combined using multiplication and exponentiation, leading to an explosion in their size. The number of possible proteins of the typical length of eukaryotic proteins is 20⁴⁰⁰ ∼ 10⁵²⁰ (although not all of these would have a sensible shape or function); the number of possible memory configurations of a mere 1 kB of RAM is $28×210∼ 10103$⁠; the number of books in Borges' Library of Babel is more than $10106$ (yet hardly any are interesting books), they can be shelved in...