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Images Created from Prime Numbers

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Re: Images Created from Prime Numbers

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant that the entire message is "4", not just part of the message. Obviously we can pick a subset of digits of any large prime and find anything we want. However, the odds of a very large prime (like a gigabyte) looking intentionally ordered over its entire length seems vanishingly small. The only reason to limit ourselves to primes is because its trivial to produce a meaningful composite, and very difficult to pr…

> However, the odds of a very large prime (like a gigabyte) looking intentionally ordered over its entire length seems vanishingly small. Can we estimate how many gigabyte sized primes exist? I think one can do that using the prime number theorem. Let’s call that N. What is the probability one of those N messages is meaningful? I think it is a lot higher than you think it is. I think N is a very big number, even thou…

PNT, interesting! If I'm reading it correctly you can estimate the number of N digit primes as 10^N/N. That's basically 10^N, and for N=9 (a billion), that means there's (very very roughly) a billion primes with a billion digits.

I mean, it's not that many if your expecting a message from God (I say half-jokingly).

Re: Images Created from Prime Numbers

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The classic prime joke (saw it originally in Sci Am back in the ... 70's? 80's?). Found an approximation when I googled it: A mathematician, physicist, and engineer are taking a math test. One question asks "Are all odd numbers prime?" The mathematician thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime -- nope, not all odd numbers are prime." The physicist thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 ...…

Help with the joke? I understood the mathematician and the physicist, but not the engineer. What stereotype is being invoked?

Pretty sure it's just mathematicians and physicists dumping on engineers. ;-)

Re: Images Created from Prime Numbers

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The classic prime joke (saw it originally in Sci Am back in the ... 70's? 80's?). Found an approximation when I googled it: A mathematician, physicist, and engineer are taking a math test. One question asks "Are all odd numbers prime?" The mathematician thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime -- nope, not all odd numbers are prime." The physicist thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 ...…

The version I remember has the mathematician thinking: "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, so by mathematical induction, all odd numbers are prime".

You heard that in your engineering course.....

Re: Images Created from Prime Numbers

#115

There’s a great scene in the end of the book “Contact” by Carl Sagan where the main character uses super powerful computers to find a raster image of a circle hidden deep in the digits of pi. This is supposed to be a moment of deep spiritual significance. But in fact, it’s basically an expected outcome given what we think we know about pi. At first glance these images were startling to me; that such recognizable imag…

Note also that the line breaks are chosen by a human, and if you look at the bottom right corner of some of the images you can see random-looking digits that don't contribute to the image, but do contribute to the "primeness". There's the actual size of the search space, the rest of it is just picked to look that way. It's still a huge space and doesn't discount the effort of finding candidates and checking them, but it does demystify the image a bit.

Re: Images Created from Prime Numbers

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The classic prime joke (saw it originally in Sci Am back in the ... 70's? 80's?). Found an approximation when I googled it: A mathematician, physicist, and engineer are taking a math test. One question asks "Are all odd numbers prime?" The mathematician thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime -- nope, not all odd numbers are prime." The physicist thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 ...…

> The engineer thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, ..." Surely the engineer would round it to the nearest power of ten and thus discount all of the numbers?

[deleted]

Re: Images Created from Prime Numbers

#117
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I would describe it is that the primality of a number is almost completely unrelated to these images. The image is chosen beforehand, then a set of integers is chosen that each looks recognizably close to that image, then that set is searched for one that is prime (which is not unusual). Primality is the chosen attribute simply because it’s widely known and considered to be interesting in popular mathematics.…

Your argument is true; though constructing images with numbers divisible by 1000000 is far easier. Take any image you want, and replace the last figures by zeroes. You'll just get a small artefact in the bottom right corner!

Not in binary, right?

Re: Images Created from Prime Numbers

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help with the joke? I understood the mathematician and the physicist, but not the engineer. What stereotype is being invoked?

Pretty sure it's just mathematicians and physicists dumping on engineers. ;-)

Cause engineers are bad at math because you don’t really need to be good at math to write good code.

Re: Images Created from Prime Numbers

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, there will be multiple copies of data, some uncompressed, some compressed in different formats like gzip, lzo, etc.

And each copy will occur infinitely often.

And man there is a hell of a lot of fake news in there.
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