this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] Sconrad122@lemmy.world 30 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Pi is an infinite series of non-repeating digits, and yet you will never find the letter A in pi because there is a 0% chance of the letter A being a digit in a decimal system. By the same logic, infinite possibilities do not guarantee that every conceivable state occurs, if that conceivable state has a 0% probability. As finite beings, it is very difficult for us to accurately distinguish between a 0% probability and a infinitesimal probability, so we end up circling back to "we don't know"

[–] lengau@midwest.social 8 points 6 months ago (2 children)

One the one hand you are correct.

On the other hand... Behold! An A in pi! https://www.spoj.com/problems/PIHEX2/

[–] Sconrad122@lemmy.world 6 points 6 months ago

Haha, I figured it was 50/50 on whether I would get this comment or something about the ASCII representation of the letter A

[–] match@pawb.social 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Shower thought: Pi in base 36 contains every string of characters somewhere.

[–] nicolairathjen@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

While pi is irrational, there is no guarantee every conceivable sequence of digits will be in pi. However the library of babel contains all letter sequences under a certain length.

[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 2 points 6 months ago

3200 characters, using only the lowercase alphabet, space, comma, and full stop.