SMBC Comics Forum

I just feel like I've been trolled, as Zach's "exclusive The Nib comic" is painfully wrong !

It's here : https://medium.com/the-nib/a2ac3c553d47

So as discussed here : http://math.stackexchange.com/questions ... mbinations
it is not known whether Pi contains all possible sentences or not.
And even if it is the case, it does contain all knowledge separated by a semi-colon, but also all non-knowledge.
Meaning, if Pi has every word, for any true sentence in it, there is also the negation of this sentence.
So I don't think that technically, Jesus correctly grants the person's wish.

Does the comic go out on a limb claiming that Pi is contains any finite string of numbers? Yes. However, the normality of a real number is more concerned with the probability, or distribution of those strings rather than their existence. All normal numbers contain all finite strings of numbers, but I don't think a number containing all strings needs to be normal. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Besides that, most answers in StackExchange are spot on. I specially suggest reading Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel" as it has a very simple narrative describing the problem of infinite random permutations of characters.
In any event, assuming Pi does indeed contain all numbers, then it still has all knowledge mixed with a bunch of nonsense and bullshit, which still is all knowledge. Literal asshole genie and all. Hell, I'll borrow a thought from Borges and point out that all possible words are the only way to communicate all knowledge in every possible language, since the particular tongue wasn't specified by this random dude.

Ah thank you for helping me tone down my anger.
Indeed, it doesn't seem that a number needs to be normal to express every sentence.
In particular, some numbers that have uniformely distributed digits and contain every sentence in some base, but not in another (hence they're not normal).
I also agree that since sentences are language dependent, bullshit needs to be included in a string of 'all knowledge', as
one can define a language in which all the truths are expressed by the bullshit sentences of another language.
I guess it was the dude's responsibility to be more specific about this language...

However, I'm still mad that an unproven conjecture is taken as true in the comic.
As far as I know, we don't know if Pi has all sentence, normal or not.
That is, unless it is implicitly assumed that the conjecture is true and that Jesus knows it, begin superior and all.

Being a nerd, I was always amazed at the possibilities of the HTTP/PI protocol. Given a way to translate a message to digits, you technically only need to specify an index to transmit any message you want, even if you need to use up-arrow notation for that.
Of course, being a nerd I also know that π is an historical accident, and that the real number that should be taught and used in math equations is tau (τ).

Nerd wrote:Being a nerd, I was always amazed at the possibilities of the HTTP/PI protocol. Given a way to translate a message to digits, you technically only need to specify an index to transmit any message you want, even if you need to use up-arrow notation for that.
Of course, being a nerd I also know that π is an historical accident, and that the real number that should be taught and used in math equations is tau (τ).

What is the HTTP/PI protocol ???? And how does the up-arrow notation get mixed up with this ?

Speaking of τ vs π, the current state of affairs is that τ = 2π.
But I don't like the visuals of it.
Really, we should swap the constants to get the beautiful
π = 2τ
Just because the π character has twice as many legs as τ

maskedscavenger wrote:I just feel like I've been trolled, as Zach's "exclusive The Nib comic" is painfully wrong !

It's here : https://medium.com/the-nib/a2ac3c553d47

So as discussed here : http://math.stackexchange.com/questions ... mbinations
it is not known whether Pi contains all possible sentences or not.
And even if it is the case, it does contain all knowledge separated by a semi-colon, but also all non-knowledge.
Meaning, if Pi has every word, for any true sentence in it, there is also the negation of this sentence.
So I don't think that technically, Jesus correctly grants the person's wish.

who cares nerd?

I don't know what it means to care nerd, but I'm sure I would care nerd if I knew. I probably cared nerd in the past at least once.

I nerd, you nerd, we all nerd for cares nerd!

Nerd wrote:Being a nerd, I was always amazed at the possibilities of the HTTP/PI protocol. Given a way to translate a message to digits, you technically only need to specify an index to transmit any message you want, even if you need to use up-arrow notation for that.
Of course, being a nerd I also know that π is an historical accident, and that the real number that should be taught and used in math equations is tau (τ).

Being a nerd I should inform you that it's not possible to compress all words (e.g. HTML documents) to a smaller size - at least half of them will end up being larger, no matter what compression algorithm is used (including finding the word in pi and storing "only" the offset + length). So you should probably stick to gzip or bzip2 for now

Njol wrote:Being a nerd I should inform you that it's not possible to compress all words (e.g. HTML documents) to a smaller size - at least half of them will end up being larger, no matter what compression algorithm is used (including finding the word in pi and storing "only" the offset + length). So you should probably stick to gzip or bzip2 for now

You are technically inaccurate because even for <b>lossless</b> compression, all words in a text document (HTML, etc) can indeed be compressed to a smaller size, because of ANSI or UNICODE being inefficient codifications, natural languages such as english having a pretty low entropy (2.3bits/character), and the regular structure of HTML documents.

That aside, HTTP/PI is not a compression mechanism, is a protocol. Note that you don't need to specify the length, because being a valid HTTP packet, it already contains the length field and ending delimiters inside the sequence. This makes the protocol immune to 'heartbleed'-type attacks.

Nerd wrote:

Njol wrote:Being a nerd I should inform you that it's not possible to compress all words (e.g. HTML documents) to a smaller size - at least half of them will end up being larger, no matter what compression algorithm is used (including finding the word in pi and storing "only" the offset + length). So you should probably stick to gzip or bzip2 for now

You are technically inaccurate because even for <b>lossless</b> compression, all words in a text document (HTML, etc) can indeed be compressed to a smaller size, because of ANSI or UNICODE being inefficient codifications, natural languages such as english having a pretty low entropy (2.3bits/character), and the regular structure of HTML documents.

That aside, HTTP/PI is not a compression mechanism, is a protocol. Note that you don't need to specify the length, because being a valid HTTP packet, it already contains the length field and ending delimiters inside the sequence. This makes the protocol immune to 'heartbleed'-type attacks.

Well, in order to state that all HTML documents can be compressed, you have to assume that all of them have something in common. For example, that they all contain the string <html>.
If no assumption is made about the document, then some can't be compressed. So it's not technically false.

So, what's that HTTP/PI protocol ?

Guest wrote:

Nerd wrote:

Njol wrote:Being a nerd I should inform you that it's not possible to compress all words (e.g. HTML documents) to a smaller size - at least half of them will end up being larger, no matter what compression algorithm is used (including finding the word in pi and storing "only" the offset + length). So you should probably stick to gzip or bzip2 for now

You are technically inaccurate because even for <b>lossless</b> compression, all words in a text document (HTML, etc) can indeed be compressed to a smaller size, because of ANSI or UNICODE being inefficient codifications, natural languages such as english having a pretty low entropy (2.3bits/character), and the regular structure of HTML documents.

That aside, HTTP/PI is not a compression mechanism, is a protocol. Note that you don't need to specify the length, because being a valid HTTP packet, it already contains the length field and ending delimiters inside the sequence. This makes the protocol immune to 'heartbleed'-type attacks.

Well, in order to state that all HTML documents can be compressed, you have to assume that all of them have something in common. For example, that they all contain the string <html>.
If no assumption is made about the document, then some can't be compressed. So it's not technically false.

So, what's that HTTP/PI protocol ?

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol/Private Investigator Protocol.

Meh, and I just googles that...

Nerd wrote:Being a nerd, I was always amazed at the possibilities of the HTTP/PI protocol. Given a way to translate a message to digits, you technically only need to specify an index to transmit any message you want, even if you need to use up-arrow notation for that..

The problem, of course, is that on average you'd need at least as many bits to represent the index as you'd need to represent the message directly.

So as discussed here : http://math.stackexchange.com/questions ... mbinations
it is not known whether Pi contains all possible sentences or not.

First of all, Jesus could prove Pi is a normal number/contains all digits, 'cause Jesus.

Meaning, if Pi has every word, for any true sentence in it, there is also the negation of this sentence.
So I don't think that technically, Jesus correctly grants the person's wish.

I think Jesus is a bit of a evil genie in this comic. Jesus technically grants his wish, but in a way no information can make it to the future.