142 points

Including relevant XKCD as demanded by internet law: https://xkcd.com/10/

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59 points

Oooh, a rare two-digit.

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-9 points

Eating the onion is sure popular today!

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70 points

If pi is truly infinite, then it contains all the works of Shakespeare, every version of Windows, and this comment I’m typing right now.

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85 points

That’s not how it’s works. Being “infinite” is not enough, the number 1.110100100010000… is “infinite”, without repeating patterns and dosen’t have other digits that 1 or 0.

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38 points
*

to be fair, though, 1 and 0 are just binary representations of values, same as decimal and hexadecimal. within your example, we’d absolutely find the entire works of shakespeare encoded in ascii, unicode, and lcd pixel format with each letter arranged in 3x5 grids.

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33 points

Doesn’t, the binary pattern 10101010 dosen’t exists on that number, for example.

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7 points
*

Actually, there’d only be single pixels past digit 225 in the last example, if I understand you correctly.

If we can choose encoding, we can “cheat” by effectively embedding whatever we want to find in the encoding. The existence of every substring in a one of a set of ordinary encodings might not even be a weaker property than a fixed encoding, though, because infinities can be like that.

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9 points

If it’s infinite without repeating patterns then it just contain all patterns, no? Eh i guess that’s not how that works, is it? Half of all patterns is still infinity.

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24 points

No. 1011001110001111… (One 1, one 0, two 1s, two zeros…) Doesn’t contain repeating patterns. It also doesn’t contain any patterns with ‘2’ in it.

But pi is believed to be normal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

So it should contain all finite patterns an infinite number of times.

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8 points

Not, the example I gave have infinite decimals who doesn’t repeat and don’t contain any patterns.

What people think about when said that pi contain all patters, is in normal numbers. Pi is believed to be normal, but haven’t been proven yet.

An easy example of a number who contains “all patterns” is 0.12345678910111213…

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6 points

Yes that’s why they specified pi.

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20 points

Still not enough, or at least pi is not known to have this property. You need the number to be “normal” (or a slightly weaker property) which turns out to be hard to prove about most numbers.

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5 points

In some encoding scheme, those digits can represent something other than binary digits. If we consider your string of digits to truly be infinite, some substring somewhere will be meaningful.

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1 point

One of the many things I loved about Sagan’s Contact is that, at the end, they found a pattern in pi when put into base 13. He didn’t really go into it as it was the end of the book, but I really wish he’d survived to write a sequel.

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18 points

This person doesn’t understand infinity. Don’t feel bad, no one really does, it sort of breaks our brains.

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7 points

shaves the sphere down with a sculptor’s knife

There. 3.1416. Not perfectly round but it’ll bake in the oven just fine.

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59 points

I ate The Onion

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12 points

Tbf I’ve heard crazier things which have ended up being true in the past week alone…

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48 points

Microsoft sues the Library of Babel

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25 points

“I may be a staunch atheist,” said Richard Stallman, creator of the GNU + Linux operating system and self-proclaimed architect of the modern world, “but any decent analysis in comparative religion would conclude that the universe is a copyleft creation, thereby pi should automatically fall under the terms of the GNUv3 license.”

Lol, he would actually say that

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