Jud McCranie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >At 01:36 PM 10/21/99 -0500, Herb Savage wrote: > >> I remember reading an interview with the Chudnovsky brothers a long time >>ago. I think they had computed about 4 billion digits at the time. Then >>they felt that there would be something interesting in the digits of PI if >>you computed them out far enough. > >I don't know if that makes much sense. If you do get something significant >after a finite number of digits, it is probably a statistical fluke and >won't hold up in the long run. Several years ago there was an episode of "Northern Exposure" in which the female guest star played a researcher who was calculating digits of pi. In one scene, she breathlessly describes to lovestruck John Corbett (who played Chris, the local radio DJ) about how there are these millions of seemingly random digits, "...and then suddenly, around the billionth digit, there's this string of eight eights," claiming this to be some sort of revelation from the Maker. It's probably just some screenwriter's fantasy, but now calculate the odds of such a string appearing at random. Voila! you'd expect a repeating sequence of eight digits on average every 10^8 digits, and a sequence of eight eights about every 10^9 - right on "schedule," I'd say. Just another illustration about how the human mind is preprogrammed to look for patterns in data and ascribe significance to them. Not every lion you see on the African savanna wants to eat you, but it's safer to assume that to be the case. Roar, -Ernst _________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
