17 ms·
Find the date of your birthday in the number pi
- watersb 3y agoI found the password to my luggage!
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y agoSurprised it's not "find your social security number".
- 101008 3y agoSorry, not from the US. Why the social security number is so private and must be treated carefully? I always thought it was like your tax number ID
- easton 3y agoIt is your tax ID number, but a lot of companies use it as a secret identifier for you since they are (supposed) to be unique. So if you call your bank and they need to prove who they are talking to they ask for it, for instance.
- rsyring 3y agoBecause many financial organizations in the US use it for authentication purposes. The risk is identity theft, essentially.
- sokoloff 3y agoTo answer GP's (presumed) followup questions: No, that is not a typo. Yes, it's exactly as stupid as it sounds.
- rz2k 3y agoIt can be used to apply for credit. You would think that lenders should be on the hook for handing out money to the wrong person, but they’ve framed accepting uniquely identifying personal information like ssn, or date of birth with postal code, as conducting business with an entire identity that has been misappropriated.
- nuancebydefault 3y agoIt is a bit weird that lenders ask you for your "private key". If it is private, how can they even look up if it is you who shows them this number?
- rz2k 3y agoThese unique personally identifying bits of information are not private keys. Private keys on the other hand can remain secret even when someone is confirming their validity. To oversimplify a little, the way it works is that the private key is input into a one-way algorithm that generates an output they check against their saved values. If the output matches twice then they know you have the same key as the one you used in the past. They cannot used the output of a one-way algorithm to discover what the input was that generated said output.
- Yajirobe 3y agoPowered by Wolfram - interesting why this was the choice
- isoprophlex 3y agoUgh. It truncated the 19xx from my birth year. I was initially pleasantly surprised to get a 6 digit result for an 8 digit input... but alas I'm not special, in terms of pi birthday compression ratio ;) Edit: - "enter date in any format" - Okay, interesting... I enter day-year-month - "there's something wrong with the date you entered!" Lol
- 1over137 3y agoWell, there is something wrong with that format :), it's not sorted either ascending or descending. :) But yeah, nonsense text on their part, they are clearly parsing it.
- thehappypm 3y agoIt doesn’t accept evil formats, clearly
- didgeoridoo 3y agoThis one seems to work better: https://www.angio.net/pi/ https://www.angio.net/pi/ ~167 millionth digit for me.
- VyseofArcadia 3y agoA friend of mine once made the argument to me that software patents are nonsense because if pi is normal[0], then your source code, suitably encoded, appears somewhere in pi. I don't know that that's a good argument, but it's a fun one. [0] and while we don't know for sure signs point to yes
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIt's a fun argument, but using it in earnest is also committing a category error. IP laws care not just about the bits, but also about their provenance (the famous "colour of your bits"). That is, the code in question may exist somewhere in pi, but it's not where you actually got it from. (Also, even if the code exists somewhere in pi, finding it there requires more effort than coming up with it in the first place. There are interesting mathematical/philosophical consequences of this reasoning.)
- daoboy 3y agoI'm gonna make one of these for credit card numbers.
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoUsing https://www.angio.net/pi/ https://www.angio.net/pi/ I can't find any of my card numbers, are they too long?
- danjc 3y agoYou're going to need a bigger cpu
- nuancebydefault 3y agoOut of credit
- Terretta 3y agoThe final piece to socially engineer with an online quiz is the Zip Code, unless the vendor turns up address verification then you need the house number or box number too.
- brynbryn 3y agoNot as pretty but you can search for longer sequences in Pi here https://www.angio.net/pi/ https://www.angio.net/pi/
- amelius 3y agoThe fact that the string "12345678" occurs only once in the first 200M digits already gives an impression of the amount of information you may find/store there.
- lapcat 3y agohttps://www.wolfram.com/legal/privacy/wolfram/ https://www.wolfram.com/legal/privacy/wolfram/ > We may collect both Personal Information (PI) and non-Personal Information (non-PI) about you through your experience on our websites, from your use of our services and products and via other voluntary contact with you (collectively "Services"). > The PI we collect through our Services primarily consists of information you submit to us. Because participation in our Services is voluntary, you have a choice of whether or not to disclose such information. The following are categories of PI we have collected in the past 12 months: > Identifiers > Examples include: a real name, alias, postal address, unique personal identifier, online identifier, Internet Protocol address, email address, account name, Social Security number, driver's license number, passport number or other similar identifiers Now add birth date to the list.
- travoc 3y agoNo, they're just storing pieces of pi.
- sph 3y agoThere was somewhere a joke program that "compressed" data by saving its offset in the digits of pi.
- sorokod 3y agoOr staying in Q, encode your program as an integer N, take 1/N and mark that fraction on a stick of unit length. Use the stick as long term storage for your code.
- latexr 3y agohttps://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
- jerf 3y agoIt's not always a joke. There's dozens if not hundreds of people who believe they're cracked the compression problem by "just finding the offset of your data into pi". It is a recurring problem online: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compress+pi+offset https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compress+pi+offset (DDG actually did better than Google here which is why I link that), and sometimes explaining to the proposer why this doesn't work is quite difficult. Sometimes you end up reduced to "Well, just implement it then if it's so easy and amazing." (Fortunately, pi compression is not particularly amenable to one of the other basic "tricks" of fake compression algorithms, which is failing to count filenames or other metadata as part of the compressed data set, if you use them in the decompression algorithm. Pi "compression" is, in practice, a much better data expansion algorithm than a decompression algorithm. So you don't generally have to deal with having to explain how they've still failed even though their file sizes seem smaller.)
- jihadjihad 3y agoInteresting that it formats the results differently based on the input. For example, "June 12 1980" results in "6 12 80", while "1980-06-12" returns "80 06 12". I was kind of hoping to find the "YYYYMMDD" value regardless of input, but ah well. The link in sibling comment by brynbryn [0] is a much better (not to mention faster) implementation IMO. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955434
- sodimel 3y ago"3-1-4" seems to be the first one :)
- quench 3y agoNow I want to know which date gives the highest and lowest pidays
- ejb999 3y agowell the lowest is 3/14/15
- smashed 3y agoI entered a few dates in YYYY-MM-DD format and it seems like it does whatever it wants with them? Some results are without the first 2 year digits. Some results are plain bogus, a 2012-03-XX date returned a 2012-10 number (without the day component and wrong month). If this is an ad for the power of Wolfram Alpha it is very poorly executed.
- joe__f 3y agoWhy does this upset you? The algorithm will be something like: ) Consider 1st billion digits of pi ) Search your exact date string ) If it doesn't hit, try reformatting and search again until something hits ) Return If you're suggesting they should replace the 'try reformatting' step with 'try the next billion digits', then the complexity of calculating digits increases as you go so this is going to become impractical in any language, not just Wolfram
- dwighttk 3y agoNot to worried about the site getting my birthdate, but seriously people, don’t share that…
- tromp 3y agoPi makes finding particular digit patterns somewhat hard. A number in which any digit pattern can be more easily found is Champernowne's constant [1] C10 = 0. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 ... ([0..]>>=show in Haskell) which is provably normal in base 10 (for pi it's widely believed but unproven). Of course the minimal index i(w) at which digit sequence w appears is about as long as w itself... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant
- tromp 3y agoSpecifically, the index in C10 where a decimal number dec of n digits may be found is n * dec - (10^(n-1)-1) `div` 9 + 1 - 10^(n-1)
- unsigner 3y agoFrom the creators of "find your mother's maiden name in the number pi"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- auscad 3y agoThis is an incredibly slow grep as a service. I’m not sure why this is supposed to get anyone excited about Wolfram.
- askiiart 3y agoNot to mention grep that sometimes just doesn't work and returns you an entirely different result, or grep that just has blatantly wrong documentation ("any format")
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- robmccoll 3y ago"any format" seems to be pretty limited. Epoch time is unsupported.
- 1-6 3y agoPi is over overrated. Check out Tau instead: tauday.com
- bloopernova 3y agoBack in my youth I wanted a tattoo of different numbers swirling around my right arm and over my shoulder onto my back. Pi would have been the backbone of the tattoo. In the different numbers would have been my birth-minute represented in decimal unix time, hex, binary, etc. Then different date systems from around the world, Islamic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Chinese Lunar, Japanese, and Mayan long count. I gave up because I couldn't find enough people that I trusted to verify that the different language date strings were correct.
- eth0up 3y agoI thought it memorable that Stephen Hawking departed on 3.14 2018.
- NeoTar 3y agoNo, since he was British he departed on 14.3
- eth0up 3y agoAmusing point. I concede, this format does have a more rational order. Your iconoclasm has broken my reverential mnemonic, but for honorable purposes. However, I will never have baked beans for breakfast, handle spotted dick, omit the phonetic k from my schedule, nor other things that would simply be going too far, however rational they may be.
- naniwaduni 3y agoIs it? It's mixed-endian with 3 inversions instead of 2.
- infinityio 3y agoIf the "correct" date encoding is 2018-03-14, is 14-03-2018 not one inversion instead of three?
- naniwaduni 3y agoYour numerals are big-endian, so the 0 of the month is a MSD than the 4 of the day, likewise the 2 of the year vs the 3 of the month.
- bsza 3y agoWhich is incidentally also Albert Einstein’s birthday.
- joshmanders 3y ago
- nologic01 3y agoFor people who's first/last name letters fall within a band of ten consequitive letters of the alphabet (any alphabet, despite its origins Pi is surely multi-lingual), one can use the same algorithm to find themselves somewhere in Pi. For the rest of us it is a bit trickier but should still work: use two consequtive digits (00-99) and a modulo function that loops over an alphabet (and possibly discards some padded values as not having a map to a letter).
- nathell 3y agoAnother implementation of the same idea that's ~25 years old: http://www.facade.com/legacy/amiinpi/ http://www.facade.com/legacy/amiinpi/
- ldhough 3y agoMarch 14 for me :)
- lightning19 3y agothanks for this information :) now would you mind telling me the name of your first pet? also what’s your mother’s maiden name?
- qup 3y agoI fill those out with "passwords" that are unrelated to the question. Joke's on you (until I lose the answers, then it's on me)
- fsflover 3y agoYou can probably find any data in pi, not just your birthday: πfs – A data-free filesystem (github.com/philipl) 155 points by zapdrive 4 months ago | 108 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36357466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36357466
- 3seashells 3y agoImagine a compression that is just a counter aka pointer + size, pointing to pi. If you want to trade computation, you could even add recursive hop pointering. As in the place this points is pointer to the next location with size.
- HoppyHaus 3y agoYou'll like this then: https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
- 3seashells 3y agoO(hhh) h=time, h=space at runtime, h=computation power.. It's like a bad trade off.
- dmd 3y agoMy wife and I have the other's name's index into pi (using a simple encoding scheme) engraved inside our wedding rings.
- dpflan 3y agoYes, randomness!
- jwsteigerwalt 3y agoA real life and relatable example to illustrate what infinity (if it exists) really means. The repercussions are huge.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoWhy does it care what format the date is in?
- syngrog66 3y agodont give a rando website your correct birthdate. not for something as silly as this. dont give any of your "banking PII set" data to strangers online, folks. sheesh. shameful made front page of HN. wow consider this a phishing op until proven otherwise
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- russellbeattie 3y agoSo, someone born on 01-01-50 has the lowest possible number at position 2,562, followed by 01-01-65 at 9,985 and 01-01-78 at 30,081. If you use full dates, the lowest is 01-01-1978 at 109,223. Starting with year first, the lowest is 1-12-12 at 79.
- roland35 3y agoMy son was born a few weeks off the ultimate pi birthday, 1/4/15. Instead he is at ~60,000.
- standardly 3y ago9/17/90 The string 91790 occurs at position 66638. The string 66638 occurs at position 29666. I'm two levels deep, and the reoccurrence of 666 has me worried.
- asfasjfj 3y agoSame here XD 290199 (DD/MM/YY) - The string 290199 occurs at position 760419 - The string 760419 occurs at position 399666
- Blackstrat 3y agoThis feels like a phishing ploy to me. Isn't anyone else hesitant to provide their personal data to such sites? It's like something one would see on Facebook.