

Brilliant/retarded idea for startup. Brilliant/retarded developers needed. - cthulha

I've already submitted a YCombinator app with friends (under the username ltoop, which has a secure password I can't remember) but I had a really stupid/awesome idea after my coffee today.<p>Pi is infinite and non-repeating, so there must be a sequence in there somewhere which corresponds to any binary sequence you care to name: text, audio, video, application binaries (Source code!)<p>So, we could start up a RapidShare/BitTorrent competitor (I have registered ThePiBay.org in preparation!) where is a database of offsets and lengths within Pi for a given file. We don't store anything illegal, have really low bandwidth consumption, and can access an infinite amount of material.<p>Users upload a file to us. We search for it in Pi, and give them a link to a page which has the details. They'll need some kind of application to use these details to generate the file, and since this could be computationally intense, ideally it could distribute the load across a range of peers and share chunks of the resulting binary sequences. That is, a Pi2Pi application.<p>Heck, why would anyone waste time downloading 0-day warez releases when you can search for software yet to be designed/released? With appropriate data-mining, people will use us for -1-day warez, like MSOffice 2020 or Mac OS X 10.9. How about i-day warez, imaginary programs that people have never have written and will never write, that are waiting in the digits of pi for us to find them! The winner of the NetFlix competition is in there somewhere!<p>I'm almost out of puns and stupid jokes (finally), so lets talk about business plans/monetisation.<p>Perhaps we have free and paid users, where free users can only search within the first few billion digits of pi. Or maybe their algorithm approximates pi with 22/7 :)<p>Maybe we search for versions of the sequence that incorporate ads for our sponsors (these versions are already in there somewhere!) and serve them to non-paying users, or we give them low res versions and spelling mistakes or captions in Polish. Pi is an infinite resource, just waiting for us to mine it!<p>Seriously though, I wish I thought of this last week so I had time to put up a fake page for April Fool's day. Anyone wanna help design a fake website for it with me :)
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jgrahamc
> Pi is infinite and non-repeating, so there must be a

> sequence in there somewhere which corresponds to any binary

> sequence you care to name

Sort of wrong. The question you need to ask is "Is pi a normal number?". We
know that pi is irrational (i.e. can't be expressed as a fraction) and that is
is transcendental (isn't the root of a polynomial with rational multipliers)
but we don't know if all sequence of digits occur in the expansion of pi. In
fact we don't even know if 0 through 9 with the same frequency in the infinite
expansion.

That last part is important because it could be that at some point in the
expansion one of the digits doesn't occur as often which will make finding
your blocks impossible.

Happily, we do have digit extraction algorithms that would allow you to jump
to any point within the expansion without having to start from the 3, but what
you are proposing would require a very large amount of time to find the
appropriate offsets.

Also, if you try the pi searcher (<http://www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi>) you'll
see how hard it is find even short sequences (e.g. I can't find any of my
phone numbers in the first 20 million digits)

What might be more fun to try is for any given sequence of numbers (a file)
create an appropriate formula that when repeated (like a random number
generator) outputs the file you want. Then you just publish the formula and
initial values.

------
cthulha
I've also thought of a name for the client software: if our users are Pi-ers
(short for Pi-rates?) then it's Pier to Pier and hence should be called
'Ferry'.

Anyone have a worse pun to add?

~~~
delano
This is a very pious debate.

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andr
Even if it is possible given the properties of Pi, information theory tells
you that the size of the offset will be comparable to the size of the actual
data. And it will be slow as molasses.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Your first hire will have to be a veteran Microsoft sales rep.

"In order to further enhance the exciting new features of PIrated MSOffice
2020, we've had to push the shipment date back by 2e15 age-of-the-universe
units. But, rest assured, it will be worth the wait."

------
emmett
<http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php>

This essay is a required read for anyone thinking about copyright law, and why
tricks like this don't actually work.

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yan
This is akin to an idea I had in college that if we take any multimedia or any
data that is in the format of header+fixed size of data, we can fourier
transform it and the frequency at which headers occur will spike as they
repeat with the same frequency, thus we can easily identify data that looks
like multimedia and even have an idea about the contents! Man did the
stupidity of that idea shine through when I actually read up on how things
/really/ worked.

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rms
The sad thing is that this is probably still illegal.

~~~
cthulha
If RapidShare, TPB and LimeWire can operate, there must be a way to make it
work!

The problem is takedown notices -- are we expected to redact parts of a
mathematical constant in some jurisdictions :)

~~~
rms
>are we expected to redact parts of a mathematical constant in some
jurisdictions :)

Do you remember the fiasco on Digg when the Blu Ray decrypt number was
released? Numbers can be illegal. In that case, it didn't go anywhere, but
with ThePiBay I think Big Media would try and push for the redaction of a
mathematical constant.

~~~
cthulha
"In other news today, the value of pi was rounded up to 4 in new copyright
legislation sponsored by the RIAA. This will also prevent terrorist groups
communicating via mathematical functions."

------
mixmax
Try searching google for "if you give a million monkeys a million typewriters"
and you might see the problem.

You are joking right?

------
thetable
The Internet is actually a pretty good emulation of
Pi/MonkeysWithTypewriters/LibraryOfBabel. Turns out, somebody else already
talked about this:
<http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-82962.html>

