Today, my alien fellows received a message from their God (and please don't tell me there is only one God or Universe out there!).Recently, Ken Perlin, a computer graphics icon that has my respect, was "rambling" a lot about PI (he has even written a peom that turned into the song regarding PI!). On the other hand, he criticized Carl Sagan's Contact novel for the God-in-a-circle ending. However, as my alien fellows reported to me, in their circles you can find the message from their God much, much easier and it is much more appealing !
Their world appears three dimensional to them as well. But they are defined with a different metrics. Instead of euclidean norm, they live in a metric space that is defined by a mix of euclidean and maximum norm: alien_norm(v) = euclidean(v)*god + maximum(v)*(1-god), where god is approx. 0.19. As we know, PI can be calculated as circumference of the circle divided by its doubled radius: PI = circumference/(2*radius). Now, since they are in different space, every circle in their world looks a bit like square with slightly curved sides to us (just as in the image above). If they are measuring circumference of the circle with radius equal to 1/2, they get PI = 3.7269767679... Aha! A computer scientist eye can easily spot a message here! For all unaware people out there: ASCII codes for 'H'=72, 'E'=69, 'L'=76, 'L'=76, 'O'=79. You see! Their God is much more kinder than ours. We would need to waste a lot of time to find such a message in our PI, and in their world it is just around the corner or just after the period to be more exact!
8 comments:
Nice. Dear Tom: You have officially entered Phase 4. Congrats!
I find your experiment with an alien pi rather interesting, even though it is a bit pointless. Using "Hello World" as a the ultimate message encoded in pi is quite funny. But even though your alien pals have a different metric system, they also speak English?
Hi Robert. You are about right! I'm sitting (let see) fifth day alone in my flat programming full time.
Those aliens are my friends, since the world is already "written" (realizing some great plan after all) we can communicate on consecutive PI digit starting from 1e+30 decimal position (of course I'm "sending" my messages on my own PI = euclidean - they understand different metric spaces as we do, and they are sending on their own PI = in their alien metrics), that's how we discovered each other and got into contact. Sometimes we get transmission error though (you know, their software for approximating PI must be buggy, so they sometimes realize my checksums are not right and are fixing it, but they were already sending wrong packets to me for some time.. and we are both confused, usually just for a few thousands of digits - amazingly it's was all predicted by the great plan!).
Oh. And yes, HELLO WORLD seems to be multi-versal.
I see...
Visit my blog and look under: Path of Programming. I think the change is rather accurate. ;)
Yes, it's funny and very true!
Anyway, I hope you like my pun as well ; )
Hahaha! Your alien friend looks quite familiar... :)
Anyway, starting on 1e30 decimal place is going to cause some serious trouble. You must have a very fast computer!
This whole entry must be the weirdest thing I've seen on the internet in quite a while.
Thanks Robert! Calling my work "the weirdest thing" is infinite flattery to my amygdala! :)
Anyway, I had to remove your photo, since it was more like "insider joke" which can be not understood right by the greater audience.
maybe it's high time for you to go out somewhere with friends from the real world? ;]
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