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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a thought I had a while back that given sufficient computational power you could describe any dataset using only two place values in an irrational number and an interpretation rule. For example, the complete data for an h265 copy of Avengers Endgame exists somewhere in the digital expression of the value of Pi. It might be googleplexes of digits deep, but it's there somewhere.

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The problem is that the index itself becomes so large, even you use a dataset-optimised number instead of pi, that it's much worse than just storing the original data.

Oh certainly. I was just thinking of it as a way to get around intellectual property laws.

Only if that irrational number is also normal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number), which pi has not been proven to be.

In addition, even if a normal number was used, it's far simpler to describe the data by just using a single number alone. For example, a binary encoding of the data (perhaps using a prefix-free code). Using a normal number and two "positions" is just more complicated.

Nonetheless, it's freaky that our deepest secrets are encoded into pi. If pi is normal.

Also, there will be multiple copies of data, some uncompressed, some compressed in different formats like gzip, lzo, etc.

And each copy will occur infinitely often.

And man there is a hell of a lot of fake news in there.

https://maskofreason.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/the-library...

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