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πFS

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Re: πFS

#71

Looked at the repo but it says NOTHING about what value this project offers. I mean, I get that it's "fun" to store information within the digits of pi. But is this just amusement, or is there a value prop for production use here? (Speaking as a math major, by the way. I'm sympathetic to the cause.)

I think it's pretty clearly for amusement. And it would kind of spoil the amusement if it were to explicitly mention that it's a joke...

Re: πFS

#72
post #6

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

The person who starts reading ahead into pi will always gets the freshest numbers.

Perfect crypto!

Re: πFS

#74

Reminds me of: https://www.spronck.net/sloot.html Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System

I have very fond memories of reading that book.

Re: πFS

#75

https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/53737/1704 > Matches that occur early enough in π to attain significant compression will not be varied. That is, it isn't possible to use π to compress interesting, real-world data because real-word strings are unlikely to arise early.

> Since the file is 128 bits long, one would expect this place to be around the 2*128th bit. > Calculate the number of bits to encode that value using log2(938933556), which is ~29.8 Can someone explain these two statements to me?

for > Calculate the number of bits to encode that value using log2(938933556), which is ~29.8

This is roughly same as saying: "If you rewrite 938933556 as a binary number / usize, it will need 30 bits".

Sanity check: 1101111111|0110111111|0100110100 (| delimits every 10 bigits).

> Since the file is 128 bits long, one would expect this place to be around the 2*128th bit.

This statement is a bit more subtle. As a first ord approximation, we can see pi sort of as a RNG.

If we write pi (ignore the decimal point), as a binary number, we get: 11011001111111011110010101011110001010101111101101110001001100001...

You can... kind of squint and pretend this is a random sequence of 1s and 0s.

Now, if you had a file that is 128 bits (so lots of intermingling 0s and 1s), and each next digit of pi is effectively a coin flip. Pretend 1s are heads, and 0s are tails. You basically have to get the exact 128 consecutive coin flips of the same result as your file to get your file back.

Imagine now, PI not as a number, but a sequence of experiments of flipping the coin 128 times.

  - (11011..01000)(10000...00100)....
  - ^attempt 1     ^attempt 2
You have to try, on expectation, quite a few times to win this game! Now, you could easily get lucky for sure. But on average, your chance of winning per attempt is roughly 0.5^128! So, how many times do you have to try to win this game? Something like 2^128 times - and you have to consider that each attempt uses 128 bits as well. So more like 2^135. But you don't have to start fresh in each attempt, you can see it as like this:

  - 11011................00100...
  - (       128 flips     )
  -  (  another 128        )
  -   (                     )
  -     ... so on and so on
That's where the 2^128 number came from.

Re: πFS

#76
post #52
post #6

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

It also contains all possible falsehoods and comes with no way to distinguish what's true from what isn't.

But enough about LLMs

Re: πFS

#78
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you aware this is meant as a joke, right?

Jokes can be educational too.
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