josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart [LWN.net]

josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart

Posted May 11, 2011 6:00 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
In reply to: josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart by cmccabe
Parent article: Scale Fail (part 1)

It's digits 99768 through 99838 from the base 10 decimal expansion of pi.

Every digit is completely predetermined, but it's pretty hard to spot if you don't know what you're looking for!

josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart

Posted May 11, 2011 16:56 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

So in other words the answer was "No" ?

We suspect (as far as I remember no-one has proved) that all possible sequences of digits occur in Pi. Assuming this is so, the fact that a particular sequence occurs in Pi is not interesting at all.

josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart

Posted May 11, 2011 20:08 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

Even if all possible sequences of digits occur in Pi, the fact that a particular sequence occurs at a particular position can be "interesting". If nothing else, it would make for a pretty strange compression algorithm (although probably not a practical one for most input data, given how large the indices are likely to be.)

josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart

Posted May 12, 2011 8:27 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

On the average, the index of where in pi a certain sequence occurs, is as long as the sequence itself, thus the average savings of this compression-scheme is zero.

josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart

Posted May 12, 2011 16:56 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link]

I'm still missing the "fun" part.