[2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Blame Quintushalls for this.

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Oldrac the Chitinous
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[2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by Oldrac the Chitinous »

Police said they spent some time working out if they could charge the man with being armed with a weapon, as technically he was armed with part of a fish.

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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by Martin Luther »

Is this a racist thing?

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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by Edminster »

No, it's a protestant thing.
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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by Guest »

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.

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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by Kimra »

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

Just saying.
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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by DonRetrasado »

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?
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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by Edminster »

Yeah, that doesn't sound right to me.
ol qwerty bastard wrote:bitcoin is backed by math, and math is intrinsically perfect and logically consistent always

gödel stop spreading fud

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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by smiley_cow »

Yeah, I'd like a link to one of these websites if you have it. For um...purely scientific purposes of course. >_>
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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by Eisbreaker »

Don't drink and drive, take LSD and Teleport.

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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by smiley_cow »

I have a cow in both my username and avatar. I'm surprised this didn't clue you into my laziness earlier.
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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by Kaharz »

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.
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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by Kimra »

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.
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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by DonRetrasado »

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.
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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by Kaharz »

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.
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Re: [2011-Jul-10] Long and Zorblaxian

Post by DonRetrasado »

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.
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Lethal Interjection wrote:That's good to know. I can avoid a few awkward phone calls now.

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