From: Hara Ra (harara@shamanics.com)
Date: Mon May 11 1998 - 00:48:49 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 |
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