4 ms·
πfs: Never worry about data again! - https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
by imglorp 4y ago
πfs: Never worry about data again! - https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
- oh_sigh 4y agoWe just need a formula that finds a sequence of digits in pi instead of a single one.
- amelius 4y agoYes, 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 agoThis 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 agoBut why?
- imglorp 4y agoFor 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 agoIt doesn’t even work with pi.
- WithinReason 4y agoI 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 agoAny 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 agoYeah, that's the joke.
- mojomark 4y agoAh, I'm slow. Thanks
- cmehdy 4y agoFrom 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 agothis is a great motivating example for the definition of Kolmogorov complexity.
- Jerrrry 4y agoIt is my favorite fake-counter example.
- zamadatix 4y agoIt'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 agoYou 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.