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1.7 Billion Digits Of Pi On CD
H0ek writes "Not that there is any use for this whatsoever, but there is a torrent available for 1.7 billion digits of pi on a CD. The data is everything after the '3.' on one line, bzipped. There are a couple of the Cygwin tools on the disk as well as source for a small search tool (because grep just didn't cut it this time). Inside the ISO there's links to the source of the data, in case you want the rest of the 4.2 billion digits available. Wear your geek badge with pride! Be the first kid on your block to have the entire set!"
...and it's available on a T-Shirt from ThinkGeek... only in size XXXXXXXL. ;-)
You could probably get another several billion digits on there!
I do not have a signature
Me and a friend of mine had a contest once to see who could memorize PI to the most number of decimals. He beat me badly. Needless to say he became a successful wealthy programmer while I still fix pc's for a living. :)
Never underestimate the power of PI.
one down, fifty thousand to go. the torrents-instead-of-mirrors-in-/.-news-items revolution has begun!
What? They couldn't fit the '3' on the disc???
00101010
"Not that there is any use for this whatsoever..."
I'm not so sure. Given that there are all sorts of interesting things about the number (a quick google search turned up this as an example), having a CD with the first couple billion digits could be useful for anyone playing around with statistical analysis of it.
That green slime had it coming.
While there is probably nothing useful that I could do with this file, there is also no way for me to be able to get it, even if I had something to do with it - One of the wonderful things about going college in the day and age where it is bad to share information is that bitTorrent is not allowed.... mirror of pi anyone?
Having said that, it seems interesting to be asking, literally, for a mirror of the real world - as numbers go, this is pretty real.
haha
Be the first kid on your block to have the entire set!
You're unlikely to be the first kid on the block to have the whole set of Pie digits...
- Jax
Why 2A? I think this would be better: 00101011 || ~(00101011)
The data is everything after the '3.' on one line, bzipped.
That seems a little arbitrary. Surely they could also have left off the "14" that comes after the "3.". Or even, "1415962" etc.
cygnuhchur
I figure the director's cut on DVD will include even more content.
At first, I was thrown off by the idea of compressing something like pi, as it shouldn't compress. The answer is that they're storing ASCII decimal digits, which require less than 4 bits per number, instead of 8. So you should get at least a 50% compression ratio, which would be 850 million bytes. But it's actually 3.something bits of information per byte, so they're able to fit it on a CD. I would be surprised if bzip could do any better than that.
If that torrent gets past 5 seeders, I will EAT A BRICK.
How about just linking to the software included on the cd and not the whole cd proper?
I'll say this: the BAD thing about BitTorrent is not the fact that 80% of its use is illegal, rather that it lowers the barrier of entry to hosting huge (and incidentally useless, in this case) files from random hole-in-the-wall ISPs.
I'll take back everything I said if that's a huge torrent of porn disguised as a PI cd.
Burn it as an audio CD. The static will still sound better than most of the recently released music.
This is a boring sig
I use pie all the time in an Engineering lab. typically out to 3 or 4 decimals. Does anyone NEED to use PI to a greater level of accuracy? If so, what application and how many decimal places do you require?
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Now I can finally find my phone number in pi.
never drink kool-aid from a big vat
Inside the ISO there's links to the source of the data, in case you want the rest of the 4.2 billion digits available.
Does their source stop working after 4.2 billion digits, or did I misunderstand something about pi?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Set up a computer at home, and use it to download torrents remotely. Assuming the don't block SSH.
What happened to my robot, I was promised a robot.
http://3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716 9399375105820974944592.com/ which is the longest you can do in DNS currently ...
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Better yet, since pi only contains a countable number of infinite digits, and there are uncountably infinite numbers of problems (see any decent book on theory of computing), the digits of pi most likely solve an infinite number of problems. Of course, since we can only describe a finite number of problems (in a finite amount of time), there are far fewer of these. The digits of pi do solve, for example, the problem of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Of course, the question we're really looking at is what are the digits telling us in some non-geometrical sense (presumably), and, better yet, is there anything they're telling us that is independent of the number base (e.g., decimal vs. binary vs. trinary)? Of course, your argument still holds.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Since pi is infinite and irrational, I'm pretty sure that the data on every CD I own appears somewhere in pi. So, can I distribute these too? :)
Even more precisely, pi is transcendental.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Holy smokes! I wonder if they have the checksum too. Who knows if there'll be errors after download. ;)
1.7 billion digits of pi on a CD.
And if you have trouble visualizing what Pi calculated to 1.7billion digits, the CD conveniently comes in the shape of a near-perfect circle for reference.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
As this is actually an article about a torrent, I feel that it is legitimate and on-topic to say:
Please stop leaching. You should open at least port 6881 for incoming connections, and leave your bittorrent client open until you have uploaded at least as much as you have downloaded. It's only fair.
Thank you.
(I assume that you are all actually downloading this and not just laughing about it, right?)
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
If all you want to do is search for mystic stuff inside the number, you don't need the CD with its measly 1.7bi digits.
Save your bandwidth and just go here to search within 4bi digits.
- As of 2003, [Yasumasa] Kanada held the world record calculating the number of digits in the decimal expansion of pi - exactly 1.2411 trillion digits. The calculation took more than 600 hours on a Hitachi SR8000 supercomputer.
600 hours = 25 days!Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
$0.02,
ptd
I'm an animal lover -- they're delicious!
The '3' will be included in the expansion pack, slated for release in early 2006.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
The data is everything after the '3.' on one line, bzipped.
So, in order to reduce the space on the CD, they bzipped it? I could see that helping for the search code, etc., but for pi itself, isn't it impossible to represent it in less space than it already takes without actually using a mathematical formula which defines pi? I would think the only way to actually save space would be to use some non-ASCII encoding scheme such that each byte could hold two digits, not one. Or encode it in hexadecimal, and use five bits per digit.
Why only 1.7B digits? You can fit all the digits on one CD, without even writing to the disc: just divide the circumference of the CD by its diameter! That's (theoretically) infinite compression, better than bzip2.
--
make install -not war
Does anyone have a link to the algorithm where one can calculate the digits of pi at any given position without knowing the result from the preceding digits?
The concept of a message in pi is part of the plot of "Contact", a novel by Carl Sagan about SETI receiving a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence. The aliens say that someone/something embedded a message in pi. The questions brought up by this are of course: Who? and How?
Guy: so, what's your number?
Girl: It's in Pi.
Guy: but I don't know your name to do the checksum!
Girl: It's in Pi too.
Since nothing is going horribly wrong at work today, I took your advice. You will not believe what is encoded in the sequence!
Most of it is awful noise, but after the first two or three minutes it ceases being pure white noise and you get some interesting texture. At this point, I turned up the volume a bit and kept surfing Slashdot. Until my mind was blown.
Right around 7 minutes 6 seconds into the track, the textures resolve into a whispery voice. I know this sounds nuts, and I wouldn't believe it either if I hadn't heard it myself. There's still a lot of fuzz, but ifyou listen carefully you can make out some of what it says:
"...four simultaneous [unintelligible] four hour days...[unintelligible]...rotation of the earth"
"ineffable truth and wisdom"
"four corner [unintelligible] metamorphic human"
This stuff goes on and on, but I need to clean up the audio to understand everything! Does anyone have recommendations for heuristic filtering software? This is absolutely amazing. I wonder what it all means?
Your brain is not a computer.
4/1 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 ...
The nifty thing about sharing links like this is you get fun mail, like this poem from a friend:
;-)
Now I will a rhyme construct
By chosen words the youth instruct
Cunningly devised endeavour
Con it and remember ever
Widths in circle, here you see
Sketched out in strange obscurity
I might just have to memorize it.
H0ek
Think you're smart? Prove you've got brains!
The first one to ask for a fork gets Pi in his face.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
"No judge, that really wasnt a song i was trading, that was just a snapshot of a part of pi.. i love math"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The 3 is trivial. The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.
- shazow
A slashdot main link that was already a bittorrent.....
I am hereby officially flabbergasted!
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
IIRC, Intel has used the billions of digits of PI to test their hardware for errors. So yeah...a billion digits of PI could be useful.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
http://3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716 9399375105820974944592.jp
.com posted earlier)
I believe this server keeps sending digits of PI indefinitely (most likely using the fun Nth-digit-of-PI formula). It's already a slow site, and will probably be slashdotted quickly. (This is not a dupe of the
I want 1.7 billion digits of Pi on the wall .
11:15, restate my assumptions: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.
Now where's my Ming Mecca chip goddamnit ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
There seems to be a similar obsession with finding a pattern in Pi as some have with finding messages from God in the Bible.
Hidding your own data in Pi digits with steganography may be a good trick. Who will bother a CD labeled "1.7 billion of Pi digits"?
In fact, who will recompute Pi to check that this CD really contains bare Pi digits ?
mmmm pi
"Coaster"
While I don't know about pi, an irrational number does not have to contain every combination of digits. For example, take this irrational number: 3.131131113111131111131111113111111311111113...
Hmmm....it doesn't contain them in base 10. Look at it again in base 13. Nobody makes jokes in base 13.
Oh sorry, wrong article.
ps. Also see Voltaire: "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
"I love donkey, donkey don't lie, I love donkey almost much as PI"
For those few people who can get eMule/MLDonkey to work better than BT, is anybody sharing this file on eDonkey?
...and I wrote her a poem...
3.14159
Won't you be my Valentine?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
What an excellent one time strip!