Share The Pi!

freedumb writes "From this article in Nature: "Two mathematicians have now taken the first step towards proving that pi contains not a single message but every conceivable message, meaningful or not."" Actually, it's a discussion concerning whether "that all strings of the same length appear in pi with the same frequency: 87,435 appears as often as 30,752, and 451 as often as 862, a property known as normality."

Comments

Badass compression algorithm?

[defile]

Soo.. if pi contained every possible message (ie, was truly random), couldn't you in theory find a specific position where pi prints out say, the Max Payne ISO, and distribute that position to friends?

Then, said friends, start calculating pi from that offset (wasn't there a story on slashdot about calculating any N digit of pi without having to calculate the first N-1 digits). Voila, kickass compression.

Of course, the small snags here are:

• Searching pi until you find that right position that matches your Max Payne ISO, which could be located on the far end of infinity.
• Distributing what could be a multi-trillion digit number to your friends.

But once you get over these boring details, pi-based-compression can make for some very neat applications

source code for windows?

[ankit]

this is the latest : microsoft sues pi for containing the complete source code to windoze.
btw, the code starts at position 4200394298 (in the binary expansion of pi), and continues for well, as long as anyone ccan read the stuff...

Re:New cult...

[BlueUnderwear]

With your username, you should know one egregious example of funny strings in Pi at funny positions:

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...

Re:Normality

[BlueUnderwear]

> I was always taught that because pi is infinite (i.e. never ends), it must repeat itself somewhere in itself

Cannot be, or else it would repeat itself an infinite number of times, cyclically, which would make it a rational number.

Ban the circle!

[Telal]

If pi has all conceivable messages, pi must contain all of the US military's secrets, DeCSS, kiddie pr0n, violent and explicit sexual films beyond anyone's imagination and much much more. It must therefore be banned. When you get the death penalty for circle possession, don't say I didn't warn you...

roll your own PI

[beanerspace]

For those of you with a spare machine and time on your hands, here are some links that show you how to calculate your own value for PI:

• Calculating PI, with computer or pencil
• Fastest Open Source Pi Program (their description, not mine)
• Archimedes and the Computation of Pi (proving once again that Greeks can really cook !)