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!"

Comments

Shouldn't compress well

[crow]

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.

Re:Useless?

[Zocalo]

Interesting, and a step beyond just using Pi (or e, or...) as a source of sequences of random numbers but I can't help but feel that there is an element of "Bible Code Syndrome" here. There seems to be a similar obsession with finding a pattern in Pi as some have with finding messages from God in the Bible. What happens if we do a statistical analysis of every nth digit? What happens if we do an analysis of all the odd digits? Or even digits? What if we reverse the sequence and try again? Try again in other number bases?

It's an infinite data set; apply an infinite number of methods of analysis and the odds are good that some of them will give results that might be considered meaningful. Even if you do find something, whether it's a something profound about the structure of the universe or even a message from God, you then have another problem. How are you then supposed to prove that it's not a statistical fluke keeping in mind that an infinite random data string will contain within itself every possible sequence?

Re:Useless?

[illuvata]

Why wouldn't they just generate it themself? For most people, downloading an ISO and extracting the archive would be slower than just to use something like this.