I wonder, if there are examples of Diophantine equations (or systems of such equations) with integer coefficients fitting on a few lines that have been proven to have a finite, but really huge number of solutions?
Are there ones with so large number of solutions that we cannot write any explicit upper bound for this number using Conway chained arrow notation?
Update: I am also interested in equations with few solutions but where a value in a solution is very large itself.
I couldn't give you an explicit equation, but if you're willing to bend the rules a bit, I'm fairly certain that one should exist. Apply Matiyasevich's theorem to the busy beaver problem: for any $n$, the set of running times of all halting binary Turing machines with $n$ states is finite and Diophantine, and therefore represented by the positive values taken by some integer polynomial $P(x_1,\ldots,x_k)$.
Then one could choose the Diophantine equation $P(x_1,\ldots,x_k) = 1+a^2+b^2+c^2+d^2$, with the proviso that there could be infinitely many solutions (though perhaps someone familiar with the MRDP construction could correct me), but there are only finitely many distinct values of $(a,b,c,d)$. And the busy beaver function grows absurdly (non-computably) fast, so it shouldn't take very long for the values of $a$, $b$, $c$, $d$ to outstrip anything that arrow notation can describe.