Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Pi, the closest thing to God?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a giant supercomputer that could just calculate Pi to quadrillions and quadrillions of digits, infinitely?

They say that, because pi is so infinite, you could assign each letter of the alphabet a number and you would find any piece of literature somewhere in pi, entire novels even!

We also have nearly infinite choices for how we assign those numbers, which further expands the possibilities. A doesn't have to equal 1, it could be 4 or 56 or 217; it's all arbitrary.

So if we had a computer that stored trillions of petabytes of information on the digits of pi and could search through them reasonably fast, we could then create a database of all the possible knowledge of the universe.

We could store decoder combination for letters in another database and thin search through pi for all the known texts of the world. Once one is found, we could then record the place it starts in pi (Probably in Exponential format to save space) and the decoder combo used. We could then have an entire work of literature stored in a few characters, and it's all part of an infinitely massive variable that contains all of the possible knowledge in existence.

In essence, pi is a database that stores every possible knowable thing and we can access any particular piece by simply searching through it.


Of course I think this would also mean that we could use a decoder combination at random and just search through pi to see if it has anything interesting to say. Since it's infinite there's no limit; perhaps a message from god is hidden within pi. Since pi, supposedly, never ever ends and has no pattern it's reasonable to believe that a detailed description of everything that could or will ever happen in the future is somewhere in pi. Of course there's just as much chance of finding a fictional version as well.

Maybe it's all just fantasy/fiction but if anything I've said carries the slightest bit of truth, I think Pi seems to be all knowing and very mysterious--not unlike many people's view of God.

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