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πFS

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Re: πFS

#11

Post by hnlmorg »

This is probably a dumb question, but do we actually know that pi has an infinite number of decimal digits or are we assuming that it does because we haven’t developed a sufficiently powerful computer to calculate the last digit of pi?

I’m guessing this is something that could be formally proven?

Re: πFS

#12

Post by adzm »

It is worth noting that as the length of data increases it becomes extremely unlikely that the index and length of the sequence within pi would actually be smaller than the data.

Re: πFS

#13

Post by pixel_popping »

hnlmorg wrote: post #11

This is probably a dumb question, but do we actually know that pi has an infinite number of decimal digits or are we assuming that it does because we haven’t developed a sufficiently powerful computer to calculate the last digit of pi? I’m guessing this is something that could be formally proven?

Well, that should get GPT-5.5 extended thinking going for a few weeks.

Re: πFS

#14

Post by hasteg »

hnlmorg wrote: post #11

This is probably a dumb question, but do we actually know that pi has an infinite number of decimal digits or are we assuming that it does because we haven’t developed a sufficiently powerful computer to calculate the last digit of pi? I’m guessing this is something that could be formally proven?

Here is a one page proof that pi is irrational - https://heuklyd.github.io/papers/pdf/Niven-1947.pdf

Re: πFS

#16

Post by mike_hock »

bobim wrote: post #6

This is disturbing to realize that pi then contains all the past and future knowledge, including when I'll pass away.

So does every other random infinite sequence of bits. The unintuitive part comes from infinity, not pi.

It also doesn't contain all past and future knowledge because it also contains all possible falsehoods about the past and future in a way that's indiscernible from the truth.

Encoding information as an offset into a pseudorandom sequence is no more storage efficient than storing the information directly.

Re: πFS

#17

Post by nosioptar »

bobim wrote: post #6

This is disturbing to realize that pi then contains all the past and future knowledge, including when I'll pass away.

The worst part is that it contains Star Wars 4-6 from an alternate timeline where Disney did a reboot casting Chris Pratt as Han Solo.

(Fun fact: "Chrispratt" is an ancient Californian word that means "Joel McHale didn't want the role.")

Re: πFS

#18

Post by cadamsdotcom »

bobim wrote: post #6

This is disturbing to realize that pi then contains all the past and future knowledge, including when I'll pass away.

Fear not! It’s probably so deep in pi that you’d pass away listening to someone tell you where!

Re: πFS

#19

Post by leephillips »

What a brilliant idea! Of course, of course, it’s not in the repository so I can’t apt-get install it. Debian...always so far behind.
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