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Someone should write a Sci Fi story about a research facility where every possible resource is dedicated to exploring strings of bits of pi. In the process they
by rick_2047 16y ago
Someone should write a Sci Fi story about a research facility where every possible resource is dedicated to exploring strings of bits of pi. In the process they could discover a lot of things like
1)We are living in an illusion and are simulated (not like matrix, as in a real program) on the computer of a geeky alien in his basement (or equivalent in his world).
2)A method is discovered to capture bit strings which are part of real world and thus creates a computer which knows all the secrets.
3)That we are not the makers of our own destinies. Pi holds our past present and future.
Man this is exciting exploration into science fiction.
- FiddlerClamp 16y agoIn Carl Sagan's 'Contact', "Ellie, acting upon a suggestion by the senders of the message, works on a program which computes the digits of π to record lengths and in different bases. Very, very far from the decimal point (1020) and in base 11, it finds that a special pattern does exist when the numbers stop varying randomly and start producing 1s and 0s in a very long string. The string's length is the product of 11 prime numbers. The 1s and 0s when organized as a square of specific dimensions form a rasterized circle."
- cgs1019 16y agoSagan does something like this in Contact (the book).
- russell 16y agoCarl Sagan: Contact. Ellie found an 11 dimensional image of a circle.
- dillydally 16y agoThis is more-or-less the plot of Borges' "The Library of Babel," except he doesn't talk about binary, computers, or pi. Instead the Library is a place where you have books that contain the every string of symbols. http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.htm...
- sliverstorm 16y agoWhy not a lone computer hacker who discovers his own destiny written in pi? Or discovers the corruption of the evil government, or something along those lines?
- ugh 16y agoOr the infinite amount of strings that sound just like his destiny but are, in fact, not it?
- sliverstorm 16y agoI can't decide what would make a better thriller- decoding his actual destiny, or trying to figure out which one is the real destiny
- ugh 16y agoI don’t think that hacker has thought that through. Sure, he will find an infinite number of biographies which tell the story of his life up to the present with unbelievable accuracy, he, however, has no way of knowing which one of them actually predicts the future. The information just isn’t there. Oh, sure, among the infinite number of biographies there will be one which is correct, but it doesn’t come with a “authentic biography” meta tag (well, actually there will be a version that does, but so will the fakes).
- ugh 16y agoIt wouldn’t work. Say you are looking for a recipe for apple pie. You will be able to find a infinite number of recipes for apple pie, which do you pick? Not only that, there will be an infinite number of recipes with the headline ”Recipe for Apple Pie” which are, in fact, not recipes for apple pie. Still not convinced that mining Pi for usable data would be a bad idea? How about this: You will be able to find those recipes not only once, you will find them several times. As ASCII encoded bytes, as PDF document, as DOC document, as JPEG, as iPhone and Android app (different versions for every version of iOS and Android that there will ever be). And you don’t have to stop there, you can just continue on. Just think of the millions of versions of the recipes with a few typos.
- rick_2047 16y agoJust introduce two things 1)A genius mathematicians. 2)A theorem to extract contextual information from Pi bits. It would give not only the info, but also work out the context.