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Microsoft to Copyright Pi, Found to Contain Entire Arial Font (sebastiancarlos.com)

submitted 4 months ago by sebastiancarlos@lemmy.sdf.org to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml

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[–] apex32@lemmy.world 18 points 4 months ago (1 children)

An example I found: the string of digits 0123456789 occurs at position 17387594880. In this case, it took 11 digits to describe where to find a 10-digit number.

So I think such an algorithm would technically work, but your "start digit" would be so large it would use more data than just sending the raw file data. Not to mention the impossible amount of computing power needed.

[–] livingcoder@programming.dev 1 points 4 months ago

What if instead we utilized an algorithm, some code, that would ultimately generate the file? I could imagine a program that generates a number which ultimately is more dense than the program. For example, if we just-so-happened to need a million digits of Pi the program would be shorter than the number. Is there a way to tailor an algorithm to collapse down to any number? As an example, what if we needed a million digits of Pi but the last 10 digits need to be all 9s?