On Thu, 21 Oct 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I used to have a girlfriend from Louisville (Kentucky), but must admit
> that I've forgotten her number...
>
> Seriously, I think you mean "Liouville" numbers.
I thought that sounded odd. I myself am from Louisville (and if you find
your girlfriend's number, I'll be glad to look for patterns in it)...
Speaking of which...
> But while watching the movie Pi, it occurred to me that since the number
> Pi has *nothing* to do with base 10, there would be no repitition in the
> digits in any approximation of it in base 10 (or any other integer base,
> for that matter). The sequence of digits *should* be completely random,
> and it's goofy for people to try to look for patterns. I mean hey, if
> it's what you gotta do, go for it, but I think time would be better
> spent on other things.
There's no reason for it to be COMPLETELY random. Plenty of trancendental
numbers have easy to view patterns (aka the Liouville numbers above)... Or
eaiser, a number like .101001000100001 (...) which also happens to be
easily describable, but only noticeable in certain bases (this probably
looks stupid in base 3, but I haven't the desire to find out right now).
I remember some notes on interesting patterns in Pi that led one to
believe that certain statistical events were NOT ocurring. For example,
in a completely random set of (base 10) digits, one would expect a string
of, say, 100 of the SAME digit to appear in the first so many digits of
the number, however this doesn't happen in Pi and, furthermore, certain
digits appear in large clusters more often than others in the list of
'known' digits.
Does anyone have any stats on this? Personally, I imagine this is the
same sort of statistical dribble as "The Bible Code", and someone probably
got their Chi-squareds mixed up when they were doing the math, but since
I'm not strong in statistics, it would be nice to hear an 'Expert'
opinion.
---Chip
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| Chip Lynch | Computer Guru |
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