Mine π decimals for human-readable data using your eyes, space-filling curves & statistical analysis.
We split areas of π's decimals abusing placer mining analogies at a central community website. Then people use somewhat developer-agnostic visual reverse engineering software like ..cantor.dust.. or an in-browser version not unlike Cortesi's. They look for easily recognisable patterns that denote common files: bitmaps, text and whatnot. They claim their results on the website at everyone's cheerful amazement.
To help grasp the concept that π decimals, ie. numbers, in fact can be a JPEG on a computer:
- A well written & entertaining blog post What Colour are your bits?
- The Free Speech flag
Is Pi normal? If π is a normal number, meaning its infinite sequence of decimals contains every sequence of digits possible, then we have an equivalent of the text ouput by a monkey spending infinite time on a typewriter. Then, if our approximate theoretical guess is not too bad, it is only a matter of time before someone finds Hamlet in π. And in all the written or filmed versions! And if π's decimals are not uniformely spread enough, then other computable constants are known to be normal numbers… See also The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences® (OEIS®).
πfs They did a more thorough, pedagogical & fun explanation than we did here. We encourage you to go over there and go through the README.
- binvis.io - a browser-based tool for visualising binary data
- ..cantor.dust..'s patterns
- Visualizing Entropy in Binary Files (..cantor.dust..'s inspiration)
- Christopher Domas's talk @ Derbycon 2012 (..cantor.dust..'s creator)
- Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula & the P(s,b,m,A) function
- π to a million places
- Chronology of computation of π So… terabytes of data!
- Pierre Fenoll ‹pierre@fenoll.me›
- Romain Raine ‹romain.raine@gmail.com›