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

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

Posted May 11, 2011 16:56 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart by cmccabe
Parent article: Scale Fail (part 1)

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.

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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.