Population limit?

[He Qixin]

I have always been curious - what is the maximum number of people your nation could have, if there were even a limit at all?

I asked this because right now, Kyupaa is only days 1 day (!) away from reaching 34 billion people.

[Trotterdam]

No limit, other than the number of days that the game has been online.

[Crazybloxian Empire]

One thing to tell ya: I think its 2,147,483,647 billion beacuse of the NationStates population counter using hexadecimal, which is my theory

[Trotterdam]

There's no way on our end to know whether the game uses signed or unsigned 32-bit integers, signed or unsigned 64-bit integers, or floating point numbers. I recall having seen something in the game once (the ByteCoin event?) that at first appeared to be all-integers, but then got inflated until it started needing scientific notation, demonstrating that it's actually using floating point numbers.

However, any such technical limit should never get reached during the game's lifespan. If it does, that's a bug.

[Crazybloxian Empire]

There's no way on our end to know whether the game uses signed or unsigned 32-bit integers, signed or unsigned 64-bit integers, or floating point numbers. I recall having seen something in the game once (the ByteCoin event?) that at first appeared to be all-integers, but then got inflated until it started needing scientific notation, demonstrating that it's actually using floating point numbers.

However, any such technical limit should never get reached during the game's lifespan. If it does, that's a bug.

You mean its possible to have 68.683⁷ population?

[Eastern Neopia]

You mean its possible to have 68⁷ population?

If it's a double, then it's possible to have a population of 1.8x10³⁰⁸, in whatever the base logical unit is (million?).

[Trotterdam]

Keep in mind, you'd start getting overflow errors before actually hitting the maximum possible population, due to the various census scores that are multiplied by population.

Like I said, though, it doesn't matter, because we're never going to get anywhere near that limit.

[He Qixin]

I've thought of some good guesses:

2,147,483,647 - 32-bit Integer Limit
4,503,599,627,370,496 - The largest integer which can exactly be represented in IEEE double precision floating-point format.
36,028,797,018,963,968 - Don't know much about this number. I only know that reaching this high in the Y axis in Minecraft will make you lose the capability to fall.
9,223,372,036,854,775,807 - 64-bit Integer Limit
1.79769313486231590772931*10^308 - Largest C++ Number

Time to reach the above numbers (all numbers * 1,000,000 + assuming that the population grows by 7 million people every day):
2,147,483,647 - ~840,502 years (external value = ~0.841 years, or about 307 days)
4,503,599,627,370,496 - ~1.76 trillion years (external value = ~1.76 million years)
36,028,797,018,963,968 - ~14.1 trillion years (external value = ~14.1 million years)
9,223,372,036,854,775,807 - ~3.61 quadrillion years (external value = ~3.61 billion years)
1.79769313486231590772931*10^308 - ~7.04 × 10^304 years (external value = ~7.04 × 10^298 years)

Source: Wikipedia, WolframAlpha

[Trotterdam]

Keep in mind that I'm fairly sure population is internally stored in millions, so for that to run out, you need to multiply all the times you just posted by one million.

Of course, there are a number of places where the game does multiple the internal value (in millions) by one million to produce the full population (in people), and like I said, those would overflow before the internal value does.

[He Qixin]

Keep in mind that I'm fairly sure population is internally stored in millions, so for that to run out, you need to multiply all the times you just posted by one million.

Of course, there are a number of places where the game does multiple the internal value (in millions) by one million to produce the full population (in people), and like I said, those would overflow before the internal value does.

Yep, definitely significant.

For example, you only need less than a year of playing on NS for your population to reach 2.147 billion people, but reaching 2.147 quadrillion people requires more than 840,000 years of playing.