From: Scott Badger (wbadger@psyberlink.net)
Date: Mon May 11 1998 - 06:50:54 MDT
>>Scott Badger:
>
>> > We were instructed to run out the value of pi (sp?...22 / 7 =
>>3.141........) out as far as we could. As all of you recall, it is a
>>non-repeating decimal. A program was designed to monitor the run for any
>>non-random deviations. After pi was calculated out to millions or
billions
>>of places a binary sequence of numbers suddenly started appearing (1's and
>>0's) creating a message.
>
>A nice literary conceit, but there's a leetle problem. The algorithm used
>to generate PI can be written in a few thousand bytes of computer code,
>therfore
>the information content of PI is actually quite small, not enough to store
>the plans for a Contact Machine.....
>
>(BTW, I am referring to the ones actually used to rapidly compute billions
>of digits. Describing the series which sums to PI can be done with much
less
>code, but a much longer run time....)
>
>
>O--------------------------------O
>| Hara Ra <harara@shamanics.com> |
>| Box 8334 Santa Cruz, CA 95061 |
>O--------------------------------O
>
>
First of all, the plans for the vehicle were imbedded in the signal we
received from the extraterrestrials, not pi. The message from god was
imbedded in pi. I'm rusty on this stuff, but what would an algorithm for
running pi out to billions of places have to do with the numbers themselves
anyway?
Secondly, my apologies for bringing up ancient history (re nanoguitar). I
saw it in a magazine for the first time that same day. I did notice your
very next post, however, had something to do with a one-horned goat from
decade ago. Talk about ancient history.
best,
Scott
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