by jkbyc on 3/14/15, 10:48 PM with 29 comments
by brudgers on 3/15/15, 4:13 AM
It's all a matter of interpretation.We can just as easily choose a different arbitrary encoding and claim to have found all the books in π. There's no need to make things complicated. We are free to pick any interpretation we want once we are claiming that numbers represent books. Let:
B = {b1, b2,...bn}
Such that it contains the set of all books. And let: def Find-books(num)
if 3.14 < num < 3.15
then return B
else return "all the books not found"
The article assumes that there is some natural way of encoding books. But digits of π are not Unicode or Ascii characters. Though we can interpret a digit or string of digits as such, that encoding is arbitrary not a property of the natural or mathematical world.by plikan13 on 3/15/15, 11:19 AM
by BuildTheRobots on 3/15/15, 12:24 AM
by axblount on 3/15/15, 5:53 AM
by a3n on 3/15/15, 1:45 AM
My dim understanding of the issues leads me to consider a conflict. Pi is more or less considered to be more or less random, or some flavor of random, notwithstanding known patterns of Pi. "Random," to me, sounds a lot like "unorganized."
A book is definitely organized. A larger book is highly organized (entropically speaking). So while you probably can find the same sequence of words in a two-word or ten-word or other small book in Pi, at some point you get a book that's too highly organized to appear in Pi.
However, Pi is also infinite, so it's infinitely possible to find any sequence. (This sounds really hand-wavy to me).
But since Pi is infinite, then isn't it also infinitely unorganized?
by danbruc on 3/15/15, 12:59 AM
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93...
by gchokov on 3/15/15, 10:53 AM
by antaviana on 3/15/15, 10:25 AM
by hurin on 3/15/15, 2:43 AM
The reason the linked article in itself is quite worthless is because it trivializes the question from philosophy of mathematics to oh pi is random let's calculate probability - but obviously that has nothing to do with the real problem.