Confused -- you think they *meant* floor 4,294,967,295?

When they say "grand" arcade they are NOT messing about.

Surely that would imply a thousand floors?

Yes, in the same way as a grand piano has 1,000 keys.

Surely a "grand" arcade would be 1023 floors? You know your engineering is getting good when its exponential increase outstrips that of the size of your standard integers. (For reference, a car park 4294967295 floors high would reach something like 1/3 of the way to the orbit of mars. Of course, you might introduce some kind of fractal squeezing to fit an endless carpark in a finite height, but then some buggers going to come along and Hilbert you up :))

I'm fairly sure going up a spiral ramp that goes a third of the way to Mars would make anybody too dizzy to park! Not to mention e.g. the lack of air, and all that.

Still, shoppers would be even more inclined to buy things in chain stores then.

I calculate you'd experience about 6G at the top, climbing mightn't be necessary. But that wasn't as insane as I expected it was, I'm not sure if I multiplied correctly. The *building* I'm sure would be destroyed though.

I'm not sure what they *did* mean. I would have assumed the sign would have been written by a human. But it sounds like the sort of snafu that could only have come out of software. If the signs are automatically produced it could make sense (-1 is a placeholder, -1 means floor -1 but the ordering is screwed up, etc). But I'm sure I'm missing something.

For all I know, it's like HP Staion 9 3/4 or Being John Malkovich floor 7 1/2, and if you'd been able to get in you'd have been whisked to the top floor *the day before*.

I note that the Burj Dubai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Dubai) has enough floors to give this problem with 8-bit signed ints.

But completed in 2008 -- I predict by then we'll have default int sizes greater than 8 bits :) But lol.

To actually break the int, you probably need to go back in time to when someone cleverly encoded a floor in one or two bits, but buildings were already higher :)

You might need to be a termite for this.