If anyone's interested, I wrote up a tangentially similar project last year. It was a fun use an afternoon ;)
100% Compression Using Pi
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: 100% Compression Using Pi
#12It's not a good compression algorithm because the offset into pi will require more digits to represent than the data you are trying to compress in the first place. Quite a lot more considering the law of big numbers. So ultimately this algorithm is going to expand the size of your data by some enormous factor.
Re: 100% Compression Using Pi
#13I'm willing to invest if you have patents.
The patent is already written, but I can't tell you the offset.
Re: 100% Compression Using Pi
#14Very nice!
I think we should have more April Fools along the year. My favorite "project" so far is still RFC2549.
Re: 100% Compression Using Pi
#15similarly, we could just store files as pointers to books in the Library of Babel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel ) - since there are books there that have the base64 encoded versions of your files as well
Re: 100% Compression Using Pi
#161. There is no proof that pi is a normal number. 2. The index of the position takes up space.
1. Well, here's to hoping.
2. He addressed this - you store the index in pi as well. If the index of the index is too big, you can store that too... indices all the way down!
Re: 100% Compression Using Pi
#17Brilliant. But this is dangerous stuff in the wrong hands. If the NSA gets hold of it, BANG!, everything is metadata. Even you are coded in many codes many times along any expansion of pi... You can now be considered metadata.
Re: 100% Compression Using Pi
#18The bigger the file, the lower the probability of finding an equivalent number (in pi) in this lifetime.
Re: 100% Compression Using Pi
#19It's not a good compression algorithm because the offset into pi will require more digits to represent than the data you are trying to compress in the first place. Quite a lot more considering the law of big numbers. So ultimately this algorithm is going to expand the size of your data by some enormous factor.
No, you just have to store the offset as well. And the offset for the offset. Then you just have to keep track of the number of offset cycles you've gone through - and you can store this as well.
Keep doing this until you have a number that is smaller than your file...
might take a while, but it would be very elegant.
Re: 100% Compression Using Pi
#20That reminds me of the ending of the novel/movie "Contact" by Carl Sagan. When calculating pi in base 11, there was an implausibly long run of 0's and 1's, which made a pretty picture when you plotted it in two dimensions. So if you entered that picture as your file, the file system would make a major discovery :-).
Someone actually wrote a paper on the properties of these numbers: http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.2348
This is the second time in a week I'm mentioning Carl Sagan in a comment. I'll stop doing that now.