How about ANY FINITE SEQUENCE AT ALL?

5 points

My guess would be that - depending on the number of digits you are looking for in the sequence - you could calculate the probability of finding any given group of those digits.

For example, there is a 100% probability of finding any group of two, three or four digits, but that probability decreases as you approach one hundred thousand digits.

Of course, the difficulty in proving this hypothesis rests on the computing power needed to prove it empirically and the number of digits of Pi available. That is, a million digits of Pi is a small number if you are looking for a ten thousand digit sequence

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2 points

But surely given infinity, there is no problem finding a number of ANY length. It’s there, somewhere, eventually, given that nothing repeats, the number is NORMAL, as people have said, and infinite.

The probability is 100% for any number, no matter how large, isn’t it?

Smart people?

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1 point

In theory, sure. In practice, are we really going to find a series of ten thousand ones? I would also like to hear more opinions from smart people

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155 points
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It’s almost sure to be the case, but nobody has managed to prove it yet.

Simply being infinite and non-repeating doesn’t guarantee that all finite sequences will appear. For example, you could have an infinite non-repeating number that doesn’t have any 9s in it. But, as far as numbers go, exceptions like that are very rare, and in almost all (infinite, non-repeating) numbers you’ll have all finite sequences appearing.

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9 points

Exceptions are infinite. Is that rare?

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2 points

Yes. The exceptions are a smaller cardinality of infinity than the set of all real numbers.

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14 points

Rare in this context is a question of density. There are infinitely many integers within the real numbers, for example, but there are far more non-integers than integers. So integers are more rare within the real.

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-9 points

There is not density in infinity

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1 point

Yes, compared to the infinitely more non exceptions. For each infinite number that doesn’t contain the digit 9 you have an infinite amount of numbers that can be mapped to that by removing all the 9s. For example 3.99345 and 3.34999995 both map to 3.345. In the other direction it doesn’t work that way.

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5 points

Very rare in the sense that they have a probability of 0.

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9 points

There are lot that fit that pattern. However, most/all naturally used irrational numbers seem to be normal. Maths has, however had enough things that seemed ‘obvious’ which turned out to be false later. Just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s mathematically true.

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76 points
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A number for which that is true is called a normal number. It’s proven that almost all real numbers are normal, but it’s very difficult to prove that any particular number is normal. It hasn’t yet been proved that π is normal, though it’s generally assumed to be.

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12 points

I love the idea (and it’s definitely true) that there are irrational numbers which, when written in a suitable base, contain the sequence of characters, “This number is provably normal” and are simultaneously not normal.

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4 points

Technically to meet OPs criteria it needs only be a rich number in base 10, not necessarily a normal one. Although being normal would certainly be sufficient

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76 points
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No, the fact that a number is infinite and non-repeating doesn’t mean that and since in order to disprove something you need only one example here it is: 0.1101001000100001000001… this is a number that goes 1 and then x times 0 with x incrementing. It is infinite and non-repeating, yet doesn’t contain a single 2.

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1 point

1/3 is infinite in decimal form, as a more common example. 0.333333333….

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4 points

it repeats

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35 points

This proves that an infinite, non-repeating number needn’t contain any given finite numeric sequence, but it doesn’t prove that an infinite, non-repeating number can’t. This is not to say that Pi does contain all finite numeric sequences, just that this statement isn’t sufficient to prove it can’t.

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13 points

you are absolutely right.

it just proves that even if Pi contains all finite sequences it’s not “since it oa infinite and non-repeating”

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13 points

That was quite an elegant proof

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6 points

What about in the context of Pi?

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3 points

Doesn’t the sequence “01” repeat? Or am I misunderstanding the term.

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7 points

A nonrepeating number does not mean that a sequence within that number never happens again, it means that the there is no point in the number where you can predict the numbers to follow by playing back a subset of the numbers before that point on repeat. So for 01 to be the “repeating pattern”, the rest of the number at some point would have to be 010101010101010101… You can find the sequence “14” at digits 2 and 3, 104 and 105, 251 and 252, and 296 and 297 (I’m sure more places as well).

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2 points

yeah, but non-repeating in terms of decimal numbers usually mean: you cannot write it as 0.(abc), which would mean 0.abcabcabcabc…

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2 points

But didn’t you just give a counterexample with an infinite number? OP only said something about finite numbers.

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19 points
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They were showing that another Infinite repeating sequence 0.1010010001… is infinite and non-repeating (like pi) but doesn’t contain all finite numbers

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7 points

You mean infinite and non- repeating?

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9 points

“2” is a finite sequence that doesn’t exist in the example number

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-2 points

Wouldn’t binary ‘10’ be 2, which it does contain? I feel like that’s cheating, since binary is just a mode of interpreting information …all numbers, regardless of base, can be represented in binary.

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12 points

They’re not writing in binary. They’re defining a base 10 number that is 0.11, followed by a single 0, then 1, then two 0s, then 1, then three 0s, then 1, and so on. The definition ensures that it never repeats, but because it only contains 1 and 0, it would never contain any sequence with the numbers 2 through 9.

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5 points

And you can strongman this by first using the string 23456789 at the start. It does contain all base 10 digits but not 22.

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2 points

Thanks for the consideration for my pronouns XD

he/him if it ever matters

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The jury is out on whether every finite sequence of digits is contained in pi.

However, there are a multitude of real numbers that contain every finite sequence of digits when written in base 10. Here’s one, which is defined by concatenating the digits of every non-negative integer in increasing order. It looks like this:

0 . 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ...
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2 points

fun fact, “most” real numbers have this property. If you were to mark each one on a number line, you’d fill the whole line out. Numbers that don’t have this property are vanishingly rare.

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