User blog comment:P進大好きbot/New Googological Ruler/@comment-39541634-20190722124029/@comment-39541634-20190723141500

You're 100% right it is difficult.

Funny thing is, it is often the less experienced googologists who are successful in this endeavor, simply because they have motivation to do so. There's no better way to teach yourself a topic, than to actually rewrite the wisdom in your own words, and often this approach ends up creating unexpected gems of simplification.

Reminds me of one time I managed to do this by complete accident: One of the reasons I created Letter Notation, years ago, was to help myself get a firm grasp of how Level 8 works. I understood how the FGH works far beyond that level at the time, but I still had trouble doing actual calculations with Level 6-8 numbers. For example, how do we accurately approximate numbers like Conway's 5-5-5-5-5 or Bowers Supertet? How do compare numbers from different notations?

Hence my notation, which allowed easy manipulation of such numbers. Only much later, I've discovered that my notation is completely equivalent to BEAF linear arrays. They don't just grow at the same rate, but produce exactly the same numbers!

So yeah... these things happen some time.