By "compressed Pi digits", does the author mean simply an efficient encoding of decimal digits in binary, or there is some way to compress Pi digits further? I thought they were incompressible like random.
Typically, that means storing two digits in a byte (halves storage size compared to a text string), 9 in each 32 bits (gains another 11%), 19 in each 64 bits (gains another 5%), or something similar (at this scale, I would guess it uses at least the ‘19 digits in each 64 bits’)
Idea is to not use “one digit per byte”, but to keep addressing individual digits cheap.
”I thought they were incompressible like random.”
They’re easily compressed, if you accept taking this program and it’s configuration file as a compressed version.
(And yes, the output of a pseudo-random number generator compresses extremely well, too)
That's the notion of kolmogorov complexity. The smallest program that can generate this output. Pi and I guess any other algebraic number, no matter how randomly distributed its digits are, are not that complex.
Use base pi and the shortest string of digits representing all of the digits of pi can be written as '1'.
This project seems pointless to me. There's no scientific value in knowing this many digits of pi. He used off the shelf components and off the shelf software. So there was no new engineering that advance the state of the art. At the end of the day the only thing of meaning that happened her is he used a bunch of electricity (and a corresponding CO2 release) for no socially valuable purpose.
