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Aside from the obvious solution of parachutes...

Obvious to who? You do know that a parachute big enough to land an entire vehicle and payload safely is large, and requires much more vertical altitude to open than your garden variety base jumping rig. And do you think a parachute is reliable like a doorbell? No, they flap and swirl and have vortexes, occasional line tangles... a parachute is not like a doorbell. You can't reliably predict how much vertical altitude it needs to open. Good luck trusting your life to a parachute at 300 feet and falling fast.

Also, where is your parachute going to land? Are you driving your flying care over buildings, wires, water, trees, busy roads? Is it windy? Dark? Parachute, yah right, that's the ticket to surviving your flying car power outage.

Splat calculator says you have 5 seconds to live.

You seem to misunderstand -- the parachute isn't meant for normal landings, it's a last-ditch effort to save your life in the event your personal helicopter has a catastrophic failure.

Hitting the ground is unavoidable, but having a parachute can make the difference between surviving and not.

It's not like the it's a new idea, some aircraft already have emergency parachutes:

https://www.airspacemag.com/da...

[ a study ]... found a 13-fold decrease in the odds of a fatality when the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS, developed with Popov’s company, BRS Aerospace) was deployed in an accident, versus when it was not.

Aside from the obvious solution of parachutes...

Obvious to who? You do know that a parachute big enough to land an entire vehicle and payload safely is large, and requires much more vertical altitude to open than your garden variety base jumping rig. And do you think a parachute is reliable like a doorbell? No, they flap and swirl and have vortexes, occasional line tangles... a parachute is not like a doorbell. You can't reliably predict how much vertical altitude it needs to open. Good luck trusting your life to a parachute at 300 feet and falling fast.

Also, where is your parachute going to land? Are you driving your flying care over buildings, wires, water, trees, busy roads? Is it windy? Dark? Parachute, yah right, that's the ticket to surviving your flying car power outage.

Splat calculator says you have 5 seconds to live.

Every piece of music is could be an interpretation of pi.

It's just a matter of identifying a part of pi such that the mapping is sufficiently simple as not to be copyrightable.

Same applies for all creations and ideas whatsoever.

Absolutely. There will be digits in pi that equate to all torrent feeds. Your ID 39443409 occurs at position 30,329,023. Come to that there will be a sequence somewhere matching the entire contents of a video stream of the latest blockbuster movie. Does that mean its not copyrightable?

Your argument that the musical score will be near infinite in length doesn't hold if you use a phonorecording format that has infinite playback time as a target. You just seek the song to the timestamp index in the permeutation's progression, and press play. If you have all eternity to sit and listen, you can do that too.

In that case, your algorithm is essentially transcendental and normal. Difficult to prove that it will include all possibilities, so you may as well just copyright Pi instead of inventing your own (it's at the same state of proof as what you propose). As a bonus, you can sue everyone who produces anything at all after that date, because you just apply a "trivial" (*cough*) mapping from the offset within your musical notes to textual or binary representation.

I am being somewhat satirical, because even if you were granted such farcical copyright protection, you would still have to prove that the other material infringes by being able to cite your time offset. You couldn't make some hand-wavy assertion that "it's somewhere in there, you dastardly infringer!"

Look at the Pi-Search system that indexes the first 200 million digits of Pi and search for a your favorite up-to-120-digits-long number. Just for fun:
"The string 1234567890 did not occur in the first 200000000 digits of pi after position 0."

That's a 10 digit long number. Didn't occur within the first 200 million digits of Pi. Most songs are going to be more than 10 notes long. The odds of finding the "infringing" material rapidly drop to essentially 0 for any nontrivial search key.

Your approach is impossible. You may as well try to copyright Middle C and then presume that you can sue anyone that "infringes" on your copyright by including that musical note in their work.

Not to mention that any pattern can be found in the digits of pi, if you look long enough. Yes, any pattern. Finding some pattern in pi is no more proof of god than finding the Virgin Marry on your toast.

The next digit is 4.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=find+substring+in+digits+of+p

The string 46457 occurs at position 205,231 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted.

this query took 0.001749 seconds

The string and surrounding digits:

09722072920441600174 46457 44857898852191332549

this query took 0.001749 seconds

http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery

Maybe, in base 36, beginning at the trillionth digit, pi is:

"URTEHSUXXORUNEED2GETALIFESRSLYKTHXBYE"

That would be amazing.

Well, take that base36 string, convert it into a base10 string, and search for it.

Nah, the true logical order is a fully specified ISO 8601 compliant date, ordered as year, two-digit month, two-digit day, so the first pi day will be 31 415 926 535 897 932 384 626 433 832 795 028 841 971 693 993 751 058 209 749 445 923 078 164 062 862 089 986 280 348 253 421 170 679 821 480 865 132 823 066 470 938 446 095 505 822 317 253 594-08-12 (August 12).

That's roughly 314,159 googol-googol A.D. Like a thousand-thousand being a million, except much bigger.

But if you really want to get picky, you want the pi second: ten consecutive digits in pi matching the constraint of month, day, hours, minutes, and seconds in MMDDhhmmss format. That's July 26, 02:49:14. Treat the preceding 288 digits as the year and everything thereafter as an irrational fraction of seconds.

I'll leave as an exercise to find out what day of the week those two dates are. But I seriously doubt our calendar will still be in use by then, let alone our Universe.

Thanks go to The Pi-Search Page for the technical assistance (position 287 excluding the leading 3).

The string 3142008 occurs at position 7,724,879 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted. The string 03142008 occurs at position 62,862,083. 20080314 did not occur in the first 200000000 digits. 2008314 occurs at position 2,155,415.

Bonus: Pi in Pi: the first 50 digits of Pi, after the decimal point, found in Pi: 14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510 occurs at position 200,000,001. An amazingly near-round position.

http://www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi

Have you checked to see if it has been used here?

think about finding the first occurrence of '0000' in the digit sequence of pi, and ask yourself how far out that is likely to happen.

He remembers birthdays by index of pi, for instance my birthday may 24th appear at the index 15,634 of pi witch clearly is easier to memorize then "may 24th" :-D.

Source: http://www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi

Thats nothing I can search the first 200 million digits of pi by going to http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery ..all on the PII i have in the corner...aint I something? :)

The last digits, according to the pi searcher, are 315921943469. Now you too can recite them -- just make up a lot of numbers in the middle and hope the judges get bored!

Actually, sequence '42' is at position 92 counting from the first digit after the decimal point.
For finding your birthday in pi checkout
http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery

"The string 999999 was found at position 762 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted."

Better still, use this site to find any number string in the first 200,000,000 digits of pi:

http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery

Point taken. I stand corrected, well, unless some mathematician manages to prove the total randomness of Pi. It seems to be random; considering the statistical analysis here. But I can't find a proof around at the moment.

Interestingly here's a Pi Search page I've found, so you can try out this guy's method of compression. And how did we get so off-topic again? :)

The 8 digits at position 242422 are 42424242. No, I did not make that up. Check it for yourself at the PI search page.

If you're in a time wasting mood, you can try these:

Search for a string of numbers in the first 100 million decimal digits of pi. Try your birthday, or whatever.

Search for a char or hex string in the binary representation of pi. Find your name in pi, woohoo!

More pi time wasting stuff.

You still don't get it. If in fact pi is normal (and the evidence leans this way now), it is in fact *certain* that a 500x500 string of mostly zeros occurs in it somewhere.

Actually I do get it, I just didn't express myself accurately. What I meant was that that 500x500 string of mostly zeroes is staggeringly unlikely to occur in the first trillion digits. In fact, using one of the pi digit searches out there, I was able to determine that even a string of just eight zeroes in a row never occurs in the first 100 million digits, and neither does my ten-digit phone number. And increasing the number of digits to 1.25 trillion only increases the odds by a factor of twelve or so, I think.

In fact, even the string "8479326669" (ASCII digits of "TO BE") never occurs in the first 100 million digits. Yes, all of Hamlet in ASCII would show up if we had enough digits, but it'd probably take more digits than there are particles in the universe and probably take longer than the expected age of the universe to find it using a linear search, even accounting for Moore's law.

My point is, it's unfathomable just how unlikely things can be. Do read The Mathematics of Monkeys and Shakespeare if you haven't. It's quite good, even (gasp!) despite its pro-God stance.

Results

The string 1234567890 did not occur in the first 100000000 digits of pi after position 0.


Pi-Search page

I can't believe I find this funny :)

Search for strigns of numbers among the 100 million forst digits

Backwards link

Forwards link

Backwards link

Forwards link

(For a do-it-yourself version of this, there's a website around -- piquery
which allows you to search for a certain substring in the digits of pi. Try plugging in a random sequence of digits, and then look at how many digits it takes to represent the address. For the several I tried, the resulting addresses were all longer than the string I typed, and a couple did not exist. Try it -- it's great fun :)

Dudes, you're over-reacting.
"We hope to eventually release the source code for 1.0 under the GPL," says Patry.
Nothing to worry about: after all, he's one of us, remember?
But I don't undestand something.
How can a closed-source work EVER be the next point-oh of a GPL'd framework? Wouldn't it mean rewriting it so that NONE of the code in the closed-source version has the "tainted" (virus-like) GPL code? Right now I have the whole source code (of an earlier version) on my hard-drive. Will the new version use none of this while it is closed-source?

Or is the current version not GPL'd at all, but only available on the whim of the author. That's not what seems to be the case. Does anyone know how this can be legal?

Robert.


Oh, and another thing, off-topic (since you're not going to see this because the story is too down the front page): I found this cute message in the digits of pi 573034-573040 (that is, the sequence "...9422983..."[this link doesn't count the "3" before the decimal point.]). Of note is that 573034 is nearly 2^19th, the difference being exactly 32 less than 2*29*29*29:
/* Function: find the secret text encoded in the 573034th - 573040th digits
of pi. (Where "14159" would be digits 1st-5th,
since pi starts 3."14159"...)
*/
#include //allow C++ standard input and output.
int main()
{
int num = 9422983; //define "num" as an integer equal to 9422983.
cout << "The following text's in the 573034th -573040th digits of pi:\n";
cout << "\"\n"; //output " and newline.
int temp; //define temp as an integer.
while (num > 0) { // until we haven't processed the whole number, do:
temp = num & 0xF; //1 make temp the right-most 4 bits of the number
num >>= 4; //2 remove the right-most 4 bits from the number
cout << char('a' + temp); //3 output removed bits as an offset from 'A'
if(!(temp%2)) cout << " "; //4 if the offset is even, add a space.
}
cout << "\n\"\n"; //output newline, ", and newline.
return 0; //ANSI standard return value on successful end.
}


--

The string 42424242 was found at position 242422 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted.

We take the word pou and get it's binary form (in ASCII). This is 011100000110111101110101 then we convert that to decimal, getting 7368565 and then we search pi for that number, which we do find (yay!) at digit 4602166

Now all we have to do is transmit the digit number and the number of digits after it you have to read. That would be something like 4602166/7 Granted, that's not much of a compression system, since the whole message takes up 9 bytes in ASCII and the "decompressed" one (pou) takes up only 3. But, given larger messages, and converting these numbers to a large base (how many characters can unicode represent?) this could be a really useful compression system, provided you can indeed find the sequence you are looking for in pi (which is really hard right now)

42424242 at position 242424.

Akchilly, according to the pi search page, it appears at position 242422, placing it two positions ahead of where you claim.

Yeah, I'm just crazy enough to double check.

The string 1337 was found at position 222222 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted.

Wow, Pi is Leet!

• - Blowcat

My phone number (minus area code) starts at digit 18740826 (not including the 3) of pi.

D/\ Gooberguy

Indeed. Better pick something like 42424242, which not only occurs way early (at position 242424), but for which not only the search string but also the position is an interesting pattern....

Probaility of it occurring so early should be less than 1% (we would expect it below 100000000, not below 1000000), and probability of the position being a permutation of the string is...well...amazingly small.

Small note for nitpickers: I counted the 3. as digits; the search engine does not. Hence the position shown is 242422 rather than 242424.

42424242 at position 242424.

Oddly enough, according to the pi search page, the same string can be found again at position 1404114, which is also below 100000000. On a normal pi, you'd expect a single occurrance of 42424242 below 100000000, and at a completely random position...

What am I trying to say? So what!

What am I trying to say? So what!

What am I trying to say? So what!

...some guy found 424242 in Pi at position 242424 (counting the the decimal point.)

I remember watching Northern Exposure when I was about 13 and there was this episode where Chris Stevens dates this mathematician chic and she talks about a string of eight 8's. Years later when I read about a Pi search engine I tried it and was actually surprised to see it worked.

alcohol + /. = useless posts.
:o)

Also to be noted, 31337 occurs at the palindromic position 12022021.

1337 indeed.

Wow, Pi is Leet!

And the question would be What do you find at position 242424 of pi?

For an even more spooky coincidence, click twice on Find Next, and carefully note the 3 last digits of the error message (start position...).

http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery

-Dave

http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery

-Dave