SMBC Comics Forum

I think President Dork really needs to get his skin condition looked at.

Is this a racist thing?

No, it's a protestant thing.

Interestingly, you CAN find "HOORAY FOR ZORBLAX" in the digits of pi, eventually. Because pi is expressed as an infinitely long sequence of seemingly random digits, it is statistically certain that ANY phrase will turn up eventually. There are even a couple of websites that let you search for your name within pi.

That would have been more interesting if you'd linked to one.

Just saying.

Guest wrote:Interestingly, you CAN find "HOORAY FOR ZORBLAX" in the digits of pi, eventually. Because pi is expressed as an infinitely long sequence of seemingly random digits, it is statistically certain that ANY phrase will turn up eventually. There are even a couple of websites that let you search for your name within pi.

Can you provide a proof of this?

Yeah, that doesn't sound right to me.

Yeah, I'd like a link to one of these websites if you have it. For um...purely scientific purposes of course. >_>

I have a cow in both my username and avatar. I'm surprised this didn't clue you into my laziness earlier.

The basic idea is that if you take the numbers in pi as a base 26 numeric system and convert them to letters they will occasionally spell a word. Since pi is theoretically infinite and non-repeating, eventually all words would be spelled in the same way that a bunch of monkeys randomly pounding on keyboards would eventually produce Shakespeare. But I ask you, who cares?

And cows aren't lazy, chewing your food five times over and producing all that tasty meat and milk is hard work.

smiley_cow wrote:I have a cow in both my username and avatar. I'm surprised this didn't clue you into my laziness earlier.

And I think of it as the person who is telling us something exists job to link to it. I'm not going searching for something that might not even exist.

This is all well and good and I believed that such a thing could exist. What I am more interested in is an actual mathematical proof that explains the "statistical certainty" of finding any string of words.

DonRetrasado wrote:This is all well and good and I believed that such a thing could exist. What I am more interested in is an actual mathematical proof that explains the "statistical certainty" of finding any string of words.

All possible elements exist in any infinite set. Since pi is theoretically an infinite set, all elements exist within it. Since it is theoretically not ordered in any way, all possible subsets of positive integers exist in it as well. This is of course provided that all digits 0 through 9 occur infinitely in pi. Everyone is pretty sure that pi is irrational (non-terminating, non-repeating), but whether or not it is a normal number is unproven.

IIRC, to have a 100% certainty that Hooray for Zorblax would appear somewhere in pi, you would have to scan 26^16 digits, or about 4.36x10^22 digits. From a quick google search, it looks like the current record for digits of pi calculated is only 5 trillion, or 5x10^12.

Kaharz wrote:

DonRetrasado wrote:This is all well and good and I believed that such a thing could exist. What I am more interested in is an actual mathematical proof that explains the "statistical certainty" of finding any string of words.

All possible elements exist in any infinite set. Since pi is theoretically an infinite set, all elements exist within it. Since it is theoretically not ordered in any way, all possible subsets of positive integers exist in it as well. This is of course provided that all digits 0 through 9 occur infinitely in pi. Everyone is pretty sure that pi is irrational (non-terminating, non-repeating), but whether or not it is a normal number is unproven.

IIRC, to have a 100% certainty that Hooray for Zorblax would appear somewhere in pi, you would have to scan 26^16 digits, or about 4.36x10^22 digits. From a quick google search, it looks like the current record for digits of pi calculated is only 5 trillion, or 5x10^12.

I believe you, it's just I'm not quite wrapping my head around it. How do we know that all possible subsets exist? (ex. if not all digits occurred infinitely, it would need be true that a string of words exists such that it would not exist in this number)

It seems to me that there is a possibility that, because of the unknown nature of pi's set, certain strings of letters/numbers might simply not exist, but I'm not 100% confident of this either.