4 ms·

No, they're just storing pieces of pi.

• sph 3y ago
  There was somewhere a joke program that "compressed" data by saving its offset in the digits of pi.
  • sorokod 3y ago
    Or 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 ago
    https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
  • jerf 3y ago
    It'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.)
    • giancarlostoro 3y ago
      So are they the flat earthers of the IT world then?
      • jval43 3y ago
        More akin to the perpetual motion people.
    • FartyMcFarter 3y ago
      > Sometimes you end up reduced to "Well, just implement it then if it's so easy and amazing." This should be the standard answer, along with some probing questions like: - "So if you can always compress data, what happens when you compress the compressed data over and over? Surely you see this can't always work or everything could be compressed down to 1 bit?" - "Do you realize that there are 2^N strings with N bits, but fewer strings with less than N bits? Surely you don't think you can always represent N bits in fewer than N bits?" (i.e. something along the lines of the pigeonhole principle) If that doesn't convince them or they're unwilling to think through those fundamental questions or the implementation, it's a hopeless case that is best left alone.
      • jerf 3y ago
        I actually tried to link to the comp.compression FAQ but was disappointed that it didn't directly address pi compression, despite its popularity. It does address the pigeonhole principle though. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq/part1/ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq/part1/