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100% Compression Using Pi

87 points · 32 comments · 12 years ago · gburt

github.com

angersock12 years ago
It's always wonderful to see solid implementations of really terrible ideas.
cschmidt12 years ago
That reminds me of the ending of the novel/movie "Contact" by Carl Sagan. When calculating pi in base 11, there was an implausibly long run of 0's and 1's, which made a pretty picture when you plotted it in two dimensions. So if you entered that picture as your file, the file system would make a major discovery :-).
Someone actually wrote a paper on the properties of these numbers: http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.2348
This is the second time in a week I'm mentioning Carl Sagan in a comment. I'll stop doing that now.
pjungwir12 years ago
```
    > All possible finite files must exist within π.
    > The first record of this observation dates back to 2001.
```
I'm surprised to hear this, since I had a buddy in high school in the early 90s who insisted on the same thing. Even then I could see the problem was storing the offset & length of the desired sequence would be worse than storing the sequence itself. This friend was brilliant, but he had a history of crazy half-joking ideas. He insisted the natural numbers don't exist, since you have to cross an infinite range of real numbers to get from 0 to 1.
gfody12 years ago
It's not a good compression algorithm because the offset into pi will require more digits to represent than the data you are trying to compress in the first place. Quite a lot more considering the law of big numbers. So ultimately this algorithm is going to expand the size of your data by some enormous factor.
Mgccl12 years ago
1. There is no proof that pi is a normal number. 2. The index of the position takes up space.
gmuslera12 years ago
http://www.angio.net/pi/
In 100 millons of digits of pi there is less than 1% of chances of finding a given 10 character string. Probably mankind wasnt on earth enough time to have calculated yet the amounts of digits that would imply finding there something big with high chances.
goshx12 years ago
Very nice!
I think we should have more April Fools along the year. My favorite "project" so far is still RFC2549.
enriquepablo12 years ago
Brilliant. But this is dangerous stuff in the wrong hands. If the NSA gets hold of it, BANG!, everything is metadata. Even you are coded in many codes many times along any expansion of pi... You can now be considered metadata.
myang12 years ago
Here's an idea for data storage inspired by this project: 1. Encode the data into a floating number R 2. Take a steel rod, assuming its length is L, make a mark on the rod at the distance of L*R from one end To read the data, just measure the location of the mark and back out R. Not as genius but isn't it still great? :)
lutusp12 years ago
The article is obviously a joke, but it's worth mentioning that the square root of any non-perfect-square number would do as well as Pi. All of them contain infinite sequences of apparently perfect randomness.
Also, not only is it true that any imaginable sequence appears in Pi, but it appears there an infinite number of times.
e1ven12 years ago
If anyone's interested, I wrote up a tangentially similar project last year. It was a fun use an afternoon ;)
http://e1ven.github.io/HaShrink/
cedias12 years ago
Does this mean Pi contains copyrighted material ? Good luck DMCA !
bloodorange12 years ago
I was wondering what this post could be about when I read the title and was pleasantly surprised when I clicked on it. It gave me a good laugh - we'll done OP.
Duhveed12 years ago
"In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π."...love it!
greglindahl12 years ago
You could go another level meta, and compress the location of the actual data in π by finding the location of the location in π.
reader500012 years ago
I'm willing to invest if you have patents.
PabloOsinaga12 years ago
similarly, we could just store files as pointers to books in the Library of Babel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel ) - since there are books there that have the base64 encoded versions of your files as well
denebious12 years ago
The bigger the file, the lower the probability of finding an equivalent number (in pi) in this lifetime.
redshirtrob12 years ago
When selecting a transcendental filesystem, I usually go with φfs. It just looks better.
stuartcoope12 years ago
It's great. You can store the offset in terms of pi too
steveinator12 years ago
Genious

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6698852