American Pi
predigested got me thinking about the holiday, and I encountered a neat article on wikipedia about the "Feynman Point"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_point
at which, 762 digits deep into pi, you get six 9s in a row. Aside from being a handy point to round off, it seems like an odd bit of structure in a presumably random sequence.
Ok, so in any long enough random string you're going to get weird bits that look like patterns. And maybe this one is an artifact of counting in base 10. 999999 Base 10 probably looks random and boring in Base 12.
I wonder if anyone's done a study of anomalies in pi, and whether they've come out with any higher-order patterns. Something like the end of Contact would be nice:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_point
at which, 762 digits deep into pi, you get six 9s in a row. Aside from being a handy point to round off, it seems like an odd bit of structure in a presumably random sequence.
Ok, so in any long enough random string you're going to get weird bits that look like patterns. And maybe this one is an artifact of counting in base 10. 999999 Base 10 probably looks random and boring in Base 12.
I wonder if anyone's done a study of anomalies in pi, and whether they've come out with any higher-order patterns. Something like the end of Contact would be nice:)