
Six Nines in Pi - phonebucket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_nines_in_pi
======
vadansky
Somewhat related:

[https://github.com/philipl/pifs](https://github.com/philipl/pifs)

If the expansion of pi is normal then all your data is already in it

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0-_-0
And you can compress any data as the index at which it occurs in pi!!!1!

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jacobkg
Can the index be reliably represented in fewer bytes than the data itself?

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jameshart
this question is equivalent to asking a physicist about a machine, ‘but can it
reliably do more work than you put in to it?’

The equivalent of the law of thermodynamics in this case is the pigeonhole
principle.

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ramshorns
In fact, no compression scheme can reliably compress data to fewer bytes than
it started as, thanks to the pigeonhole principle.

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sp332
[https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25](https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25)

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marktani
These two belong together: [https://xkcd.com/221/](https://xkcd.com/221/)

Also really interesting to think about that you shared a comic that's almost
20 years old. Where did time go?

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flatiron
Sony did the same thing with the ps3

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gblanchette
The first missing prime in the first million digits of pi is 100057 (
[https://primes.utm.edu/curios/page.php?short=100057](https://primes.utm.edu/curios/page.php?short=100057)).

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ashton314
Is there a proof that says that any arbitrary finite sequence of digits will
appear somewhere in the digits of pi? Are there finite sequences known to
never appear?

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marktani
Wow, your question led to some Wikipedia research on my end, and I found this:

'In particular, the popular claim "every string of numbers eventually occurs
in π" has not been proven.'

I think I claimed this before. Oops!

Quote from
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number).

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im3w1l
It's a common misconception

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dvt
Pi is conjectured[1], though not proved, to be normal. If true (likely), we
can expect to find Moby Dick in its entirety somewhere in 𝛑, along with
tomorrow's news of the day. Eventually, we'll find a string of digits
nnnn....nnnn that's going to be longer than the number of particles in our
universe. Of course, there's also a _lot_ of gibberish.

[1]
[http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/users/gualtieri/Is%20Pi%20normal.ht...](http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/users/gualtieri/Is%20Pi%20normal.htm)

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dantondwa
This reminds me of Borges' Library of Babel:
[https://libraryofbabel.info/libraryofbabel.html](https://libraryofbabel.info/libraryofbabel.html)

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nategri
Gets me thinking about then ending of the book version of _Contact_.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
A more numinous ending at that.

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nvusuvu
I wonder what the longest known streak of identical digits is in pi. Also,
does the sequence 0123456789 happen any in location of the known digits of pi?

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dmurray
There's a sequence of thirteen eights, and twelve of each of the other digits,
documented at [0] which covers the first 2.7 trillion digits. Based on that
you can be all but certain any given ten-digit sequence, including 0123456789,
has also been found.

[0]
[https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/pidigits.html](https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/pidigits.html)

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8bitsrule
The people who produced 800-1160-digit approximations of pi before computers
... back in the late 1940s (e.g. Wrench & Smith) ... used electro-mechanical
calculators (e.g. Marchant). That (doomed) technology is well-documented here:
[http://www.vintagecalculators.com/](http://www.vintagecalculators.com/)

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hx2a
I love how Wikipedia contains these weird little nuggets of knowledge, and I
love how they keep showing up on Hacker News.

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jokoon
would be cool to have the same thing for other bases

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jeffwass
I wondered the same thing, surprised it wasn’t mentioned in the Wikipedia
article.

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_bxg1
This kind of trivia is my favorite thing to find on HN

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sp332
The digits "360" are centered at the 360th digit. [Edit: if you include the
leading 3 before the decimal, which Wikipedia doesn't.]

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Aperocky
All my passwords are conveniently stored in the constant Pi

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hinkley
Now I'm adding √-1 to all my passwords.

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codesushi42
Now that's one complex password, I'd imagine.

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hinkley
Hmmm, on second thought, maybe i shouldn't be involved.

