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!
