6 ms·

So does it mean that these pi-calculating competitions & record are now going to devolve to special olympiads in pointless storage capacity? What will the super

• imglorp 4y ago
  πfs: Never worry about data again! - https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
  • oh_sigh 4y ago
    We just need a formula that finds a sequence of digits in pi instead of a single one.
    • amelius 4y ago
      Yes, we are too much focused on the reverse problem. We know exactly how much time we need to compute the nth digit of pi. But how much time do we need to find a specific string of digits? Seems like a more interesting question.
  • adenozine 4y ago
    This is one of my favorite software projects of all time. I remember seeing this several years ago and it has driven my imagination crazy since then.
    • WithinReason 4y ago
      But why?
      • imglorp 4y ago
        For me, it stimulates a mental shift that could be good exercise elsewhere: instead of storing the string, you find the string somewhere and store its index. It also stimulate the imagination: what other transcendental numbers might this work with? How long do you have to search in the digits to find your string? What can you say about the size of the index (how far you searched) vs your string length? Etc. It's patterns all the way down.
        • eapriv 4y ago
          It doesn’t even work with pi.
        • WithinReason 4y ago
          I don't want to be a buzzkill, but to me this seems uninteresting, you need more information to store the index than the data, end of story.
  • mojomark 4y ago
    Any file can be represented as a binary string, and a binary string is just an integer value - which is to say binary strings are simply indexes of files in binary space (i.e. the set of all possible permutations of bits). Looks to me like nfs is simply transforming a binary space index into a pi-space index. Some files may compress to a smaller value than they are in binary space (if you get lucky), but make no mistake, some files will be much much larger (i.e. the files you're trying to store don't show up in pi until an index value that is a virtually infinite number of digits long).
    • pitaj 4y ago
      Yeah, that's the joke.
      • mojomark 4y ago
        Ah, I'm slow. Thanks
    • cmehdy 4y ago
      From the repo: Why is this thing so slow? It took me five minutes to store a 400 line text file! Well, this is just an initial prototype, and don't worry, there's always Moore's law! So I'm guessing they are quite aware of the joke, and props to them for the dedication to commit and write the code (or the other way around) :)
  • sterlind 4y ago
    this is a great motivating example for the definition of Kolmogorov complexity.
    • Jerrrry 4y ago
      It is my favorite fake-counter example.
  • zamadatix 4y ago
    It's actually not known if pi contains every combination of digits (in any base 2 or greater) or not. It feels likely but really all we know is it's transcendental and seems pretty random from the parts we've generated. The library of babel could be a good "useless" backing though https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?hnexample https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?hnexample
    • Jerrrry 4y ago
      You just now convinced me how that site wasn't a sham. Thank you. It takes the input, converts it into N, then calculates position using the N. Thank you. I argued for a long time simply by being ignorant. good bless ya sir.
• mkl 4y ago
  Nothing will change there. There are already much more efficient methods of calculating π. What this lets you do is jump straight to the nth digit without calculating all the ones before it.
  • tyingq 4y ago
    Couldn't you "cheat" a bit in a timed competition if you knew exactly how many digits you would reach, and kick this off in parallel to extract a few more to tack to the end? Or would the parallel job be too slow for that? Or the competitions constrain CPU or other resources to a ceiling?
• Someone 4y ago
  Why would it? Calculating the first few trillion digits may be (and probably is) a lot faster than doing a trillion calculations of individual digits, but even if it isn’t, people will simply raise the bar and compute even more digits. > What will the super computers going to do in view of this discovery? Whatever they do now. It’s not like this is what supercomputers are built for. Computations like these more are used to get confidence that the hardware works.