this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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How about ANY FINITE SEQUENCE AT ALL?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (3 children)

My birthday in American MMDDYYYY format shows up in the first few ten-million digits, but in standard DDMMYYYY format, it's not in any of the digits that site is able to check.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The term for what you're describing is a "normal number". As @[email protected] correctly pointed out it is still an open question whether pi is normal. This is a fun, simple-language exploration of the question in iambic pentameter, and is only 3 minutes and 45 seconds long.

Merry Christmas!

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[โ€“] [email protected] 60 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The jury is out on whether every finite sequence of digits is contained in pi.

However, there are a multitude of real numbers that contain every finite sequence of digits when written in base 10. Here's one, which is defined by concatenating the digits of every non-negative integer in increasing order. It looks like this:

0 . 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ...
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[โ€“] [email protected] 165 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (18 children)

It's almost sure to be the case, but nobody has managed to prove it yet.

Simply being infinite and non-repeating doesn't guarantee that all finite sequences will appear. For example, you could have an infinite non-repeating number that doesn't have any 9s in it. But, as far as numbers go, exceptions like that are very rare, and in almost all (infinite, non-repeating) numbers you'll have all finite sequences appearing.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

Yeah. This is a plot point used in a few stories, eg Carl Sagan's "Contact"

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