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Would You Like a Nice Slice of Pi, Boy?
2003-01-02 13:46:01
This is about the damn funnest website I've come across all year. Granted, it's only the second of January, but it's still pretty damn fun in its way.
In Carl Sagan's 1986 novel Contact, the protagonist of the novel searches through the digits of pi looking for patterns or a message from the creator of the universe. Well, thanks to the nice folks at NERSC, you and I can do the same search ourselves.
They've taken the first four billion digits of pi in binary and created a search that will attempt to match a text string or a hex number to some substring inside the first four billion binary digits of pi. Cool, huh? For example, the string "pigdog", or 100000100100111001000111100111, can be found at index 716333368. "Splicer" (10011100000110001001000110010110010) does not occur anywhere in the first 4 billion binary digits.
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