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Finding Waldo in π

kundor.github.io

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Re: Finding Waldo in π

#71

Post by BubbleRings »

kundor wrote: post #62
BubbleRings wrote: post #26

I've been waiting a dozen years for this post! Did you like Sagan's book "Contact"? I'm a big fan. Check out the work I did to show pi as a series of images, and a cool "easter egg" I might have found buried in pi. And yes, my web site looks like it was built 20 years ago and then allowed to rot ever since, since that is in fact what happened! https://whiteis.com/whiteis/personal/programs/Pi/pi_images.s...

That's a cool egg! It's been a long time since I read Contact. Are the aliens supposed to have hacked the geometry of the universe to make the pattern show up in π?

Well the alien that Arroway meets on the beach says that they didn't create the worm holes, they found them, but have never found the creators, iirc. I just re read some of the parts that mention pi, and I was remembering it wrong. She goes looking for a picture, but I'm not sure she finds anything by the end of the book. I'm going to re read the whole book this weekend, it has been too long. Thanks for having a look!

Re: Finding Waldo in π

#72

Post by BubbleRings »

BubbleRings wrote: post #71
kundor wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cool egg! It's been a long time since I read Contact. Are the aliens supposed to have hacked the geometry of the universe to make the pattern show up in π?

Well the alien that Arroway meets on the beach says that they didn't create the worm holes, they found them, but have never found the creators, iirc. I just re read some of the parts that mention pi, and I was remembering it wrong. She goes looking for a picture, but I'm not sure she finds anything by the end of the book. I'm going to re read the whole book this weekend, it has been too long. Thanks for having a look…

So to your question, I think the book says that yes, either the universe was created with this cool egg in pi as a message for civilizations to find once the got computers that were good enough to scan for statistical anomalies 2*20 digits deep in pi, or else the egg was somehow hacked into it some time after creation.

Re: Finding Waldo in π

#73

Post by andrewmcwatters »

bkyiuuMbF wrote: post #19

With acknowledgement to the palette hack discussed in the other comments, I still think there's a ton of value in this. So often, people observe patterns in nature that appear to be so unlikely as to be by design. I have family members that are superstitious: if a light flickers at the same time that they mention a recently deceased loved one, it must be "a sign". Similarly, they will point to some overwhelmingly unl…

> But almost any pattern can be found in randomness.

Not quite. Although this is a popular misconception. It depends on the cardinality of randomness and the distribution that you're talking about.

As a casual example, an infinitely long randomly distributed sequence of set { A, B, C, D } will never contain the string "bkyiuuMbF."

You can take this example and apply it to other spaces. For instance, we may live in a universe where there really is no other set of possible interactions where life exists somewhere else in this supercluster. Maybe in a another one, though?

There are nearly 8 billion people on the planet at the time of writing, I think. There's a lot of random people in there, but only one you!

Re: Finding Waldo in π

#75

Post by kundor »

bscphil wrote: post #69
kundor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still a choice of palette; you'll find it listed on Wikipedia [1] under "Regular RGB palettes". There's no doubt it's a much more objective choice than the one I used! I did say I was cheating. Going to 4-bit color won't make it feasible. Even with 1-bit black/white pixels on about the minimum possible 18x24 Waldo face, you have 432 bits to look for, and you're not going to find them without cheating somehow.…

I made a video showing a slow zoom-in to Waldo in the first hundred million hex digits of pi, using your color palette. Feel free to use it if you want with a link back to this comment, I release it under CC-BY. https://0x0.st/oq0Q.mp4 (The idea is basically that each consecutive 988 bytes gets put into an individual 19x26 8 bit image with your color palette, and these are then stacked in row order.)

I added a reduced preview of this to my blog post. I really like how it gives an impression of finding Waldo in a haystack of noise, just like in the picture books.

The preview is not as pretty as the real thing, but I thought embedding a 27MB video in the page might be a bit much.

Re: Finding Waldo in π

#76

Post by bscphil »

kundor wrote: post #75
bscphil wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a video showing a slow zoom-in to Waldo in the first hundred million hex digits of pi, using your color palette. Feel free to use it if you want with a link back to this comment, I release it under CC-BY. https://0x0.st/oq0Q.mp4 (The idea is basically that each consecutive 988 bytes gets put into an individual 19x26 8 bit image with your color palette, and these are then stacked in row order.)

I added a reduced preview of this to my blog post. I really like how it gives an impression of finding Waldo in a haystack of noise, just like in the picture books. The preview is not as pretty as the real thing, but I thought embedding a 27MB video in the page might be a bit much.

Yeah I did my best to compress it but it's so noisy that there's very little compression that can be done without turning it into a blur. I can give you the original lossless PNG frames if you want them, but honestly I don't know that they'd be that useful.

Here's one lossless frame from near the end of the video, it's kinda nice because it gives you a little bit of context for the final Waldo without being overwhelming. https://i.imgur.com/wNZICnP.png

Here's also the full image as a 21.2 MiB PNG: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUJaeon4KjE2RGVirXTG5xQuA6pCWV5T9GW2KS...

The full image contains the first 99969546 digits of pi, including the opening 3.

Re: Finding Waldo in π

#77

Post by riking »

captainmuon wrote: post #49

Could there be a number, such that for certain interesting data, you can compress the data more than normally achiveable, by indexing into the number? I feel this should not be possible, but I don't know how to proove it without a circular argument about entropy. On the other hand, if you make a string of common byte sequences, a couple GB long, and distribute it with every PC... then you surely can achive hyper comp…

> On the other hand, if you make a string of common byte sequences, a couple GB long, and distribute it with every PC...

This is what brotli does.

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