Flutterby™! : That moment when you realize that the

That moment when you realize that the

2015-07-11 01:45:04.079076+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

That moment when you realize that the digits of pi pretty much must contain a raster image of a circle with two prime dimensions...

[ related topics: Graphics ]

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#Comment Re: That moment when you realize that the made: 2015-07-11 21:24:44.720834+00 by: Jack William Bell

Oh come on. The digits of pi are infinite, so sure, theoretically they contain something like that. But also, theoretically, they contain the complete works of William Shakespeare along with Finnish translations of every John Norman Gor novel and pictures of a trip Alfred Hitchcock never went on, in the form of an archived FAT32 disk image compressed with a Lempel Ziv algorithm.

#Comment Re: That moment when you realize that the made: 2015-07-12 15:28:13.501171+00 by: Dan Lyke

Well, yeah, but it makes Sagan's ending even cannier than I originally thought...

#Comment Re: That moment when you realize that the made: 2015-07-13 15:34:23.429849+00 by: battjt

I used to be convinced that we could use a shared sequence like pi for compression. I would just send you the index into pi and length of the data that I wanted to send. Eventually I did the math and realized that the size of the index would be about the size of the data.

Now when my gut suggests an idea like that, I head outside for some air.

#Comment Re: That moment when you realize that the made: 2015-07-13 15:58:02.08115+00 by: Dan Lyke

Grin: Yeah, back in the days when I was working on codecs I remember some discussions about compression where there was the "aha" moment of "we can compress to this baseline and get the whole thing down to... oh, we've got to transmit the baseline, too. Damn."

Only works if you can amortize those tables over a sh*load of data...