Pi on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

auratus says:

Looking a lot like random noise! Intriguing.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

zitsom says:

... but if you change the color code you'll see a scene from Gone With the Wind
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

pyramis says:

Wish I could see with a gradient color scale instead of rainbow.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

nam20485 says:

But if you play it backwards, you can hear a message from Satan.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

tvongaza says:

How do you play it backwards if there is no end? Is Satan infinite, oh my.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Blood Ninja says:

it's not a sailboat it's a schooner
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

ConceptJunkie says:

Did anyone ever read "Contact"?

Switch to base 11 and go out about a billion digits.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

adameros says:

Random dot stereogram!!!
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Proth says:

Contact was a great book. Interesting idea that explicit messages could be stored in universal constants.
Are we just looking in the wrong way?
Dugg
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

redindian says:

so Pi is random video noise? :)
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

tforster says:

shouldn't it be plotted as a circle, not a square?
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

pmppk says:

It's a sailboat!
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

dantekgeek says:

How many digits are plotted in this thing?
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Brilliant concept! As noted above, it looks like random noise. Which is cool, because the digits of PI are supposed to be random.

And adameros is right, too: If you cross your eyes, you'll see a 3D image of God. :)
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

pickupjojo says:

Really cool.
nice tv. :p
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

matthewstone says:

If you cross your eyes it turns out to be a dinghy
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Aerotect [deleted] says:

Very Cool!
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

cwith says:

awesome
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

jcslicer says:

tforster, I'm with you, but what should the radius be?
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

pr says:

so the point is ....?
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

bbhart says:

Mmmm, pi
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Dan Diemer says:

...after the first digit.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

dklimke says:

I see a Schooner.....

It's a sailboat you dumd-ass
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Jerry Heiselman says:

What about drawing it in a logarithmic spiral?
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

iain_brklyn says:

"... but if you change the color code you'll see a scene from Gone With the Wind"

Isn't it true, seriously, that at some point in the sequence there is a pattern that will look like a scene from Gone With the Wind? Of course, it would be a 10-color pixely version.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

timdavid says:

wow, so all these years I thought I had poor cable reception. My TV was just showing me Pi.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Sidnicious says:

Here's a gradient version:
www.flickr.com/photos/sidneysm/277691171/

EDIT: and for those lookin' for a stereoscopic image, here's a slice from the 3D analysis:
www.flickr.com/photos/sidneysm/277699596/
Looks random, and other slices are similar. Sorry...
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

... we'd surely invent it says:

"Isn't it true, seriously, that at some point in the sequence there is a pattern that will look like a scene from Gone With the Wind? Of course, it would be a 10-color pixely version."

I hope so!

I <3.14 π
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

m0l0k0 says:

its irrational and transcendental ;-) (Both Pi and the image)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

windowshoppers1979 says:

Very good idea. I wonder if there would be a better way to correlate the numbers to a specific color...
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

TunaMan52 says:

ooh! how do you generate the 3D analysis?
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

schultzdave says:

Pi doesn't have any correlation patterns, and the color scheme is irrelevant. You're getting noise either way.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Sidnicious says:

TunaMan52:
In Photoshop, I duplicate the image layer and set its blending mode to "difference," then offset it horizontally until an image emerges. Nudging the layer moves to different slices of the 3D image, and applying a gaussian blur to both layers blurs depth so you can see a bigger slice.

Hope that's coherent. It's a method I came up with myself based on how those images are affect our eyes.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Todd Moon says:

"Isn't it true, seriously, that at some point in the sequence there is a pattern that will look like a scene from Gone With the Wind?"

Let's assume you are correct. The randomness of pi exists independent of the digits used to express it. Why limit your rendering to base 10? How many colors are possible in an 8 bit/channel image (your average jpg)? 16,777,216.

So let's map pi in base 16777216! Eventually you will find an 11x14" picture (300dpi) of, well... everything! Pi contains a full-color, pictographic, annotated guide to the entire universe! It even has pictures of your most intimate body parts!

We just have to ignore the junk digits. That leads to the question, "On average, how many junk digits exist in-between all of these sexy, 11x14" pictures at 300dpi? Damned if I know, but maybe I'll find out.

I suppose you must be correct. It seems to follow that an infinitely long, non-repeating number must also have infinite complexity, and infinite complexity means that all knowledge is encoded within.

I say "encoding" on purpose. The knowledge isn't *in* pi because "knowledge" implies "knowing" which requires thought. It requires a thinking person to decode the knowledge and perceive the thought. So it really is just a bunch of random numbers. We, as humans, are experts at finding patterns in what is truly chaos.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

GoodAtSomeStuff says:

I think your T.V. is broken
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

justino! says:

It is too bad some image of a piece of cheese or an elephant or the all powerful God didn't show up in the image. It could brought the whole world together before we went back to our seperate ways.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

yatoobin says:

you will all die in 7 days!!!
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Quotato says:

or is it 6 days, or 555 days, or 3.1459......PIE days
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

mechanisma22 says:

What would be cool is running each digit of Pi in an equation and plotting points on a graph like a fractal image.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

spudart says:

I don't get why the first square purple. Shouldn't it be blue to represent the number 3? And then the second square should be red, the third yellow. And so on. But instead of blue, red, yellow; you have purple, salmon, light brown.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

pipedreambomb says:

That's ridiculous, you can't arbitrarily to start a new line every 100 (or whatever) pixels and say that's what pi looks like! I mean, take a normal picture, cut off every line halfway through and make that the next line, it'll be a different picture. You might as well have made a pie chart (no pun intended).
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

philoponia says:

I think I see a pattern
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

absolutdeep says:

sweet, i have finally found the uber wallpaper.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

nybon says:

cool, where's e?
niyue.com
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

li1ricky says:

If you look at it as a stereogram, you can make out something that looks like a cursive n.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Findo says:

Digital Serialism. Nice.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

vasionok says:

why in decimal system?
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

cornelius1729 says:

To [P!]Wack: Nice concept!

To Elusive Byte: I think using Pi's infinite randomness to generate all possible sexy images is overkill, since there are only a finite number of possible pictures displayable with 2^16 colours at 1024x768.

Plus there are better algortihm for generating pr0n, like um, photographing naked folk. ;-)
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

MB says:

www.newsvine.com/_news/2006/10/04/385756-man- recites-pi-t...
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

ewedistrict says:

"Isn't it true, seriously, that at some point in the sequence there is a pattern that will look like a scene from Gone With the Wind?"

How hard will we have to search for that frame?

A recognizable frame on the tee vee is roundabouts 200 by 300 pixels, an image composed of 200*300 = 60000 pixels. Let's pretend it's only drawn in 10 colors, like our pi picture here. The chance that a random stream of pixels will paint out our picture is one in 10^60000.

Let's pretend that the smallest unit of time in our universe, the clock tick of our cosmos, is the Planck time: ~10^-44 seconds. From the big bang until now there have ticked by nearly 10^17 seconds. That's 10^61 planck time intervals.

So if we had a computer calculating pi looking for Gone With The Wind in a 10-color picture, looking at a new pixel every planck time interval, from the beginning of time until now, we are about one googleplexth of a googleplexth of the way there.

What I'm saying here is, I guess, is that to look into true randomness is to look into something our pattern-finding brains gum up with frustration just to consider. There is nothing there. There is no circle encoded in base 11. There is no Gone with the Wind in there, anywhere. It isn't even like the void between stars, with it's whispy tendrils of gravity and solar wind. It's just simple disorder more solid and stubborn than the age and width of the universe, and don't trouble yourself spending much more time thinking about it.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

danja. says:

The individual (groups) of digits taken as a sequence may have no pattern, but this value isn't random by definition - it's pi!
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

pkmaximoo says:

ewedistrict: you forget to take into account the fact that many slightly different images will look recognisably like Gone With The Wind. There's probably thousands of thousands of slight variations that are close enough to count.

Still, such a number is pretty much irrevelant at this scale.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

[P!]Wack says:

Geez, I'll do an radial version of this, but the results will be so random as this.

Also there is a software that do the inverse-fast-furier transform of a image to a sound, the results I spect: noise.

well all rare experiments for freetime
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

tan.cooper says:

I see it!
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

wohli [deleted] says:

Nice idea, i really like it

Hint: If you put all colors of one group together, you'll get a rainbow ;D
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

jestercard says:

We all know the real reason for calculating pi is to find the perfect picture of you and Lucy Liu having sex.
(Something Postive(.net))
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

closethipster says:

Absolutely brilliant.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

RJL20 says:

"Isn't it true, seriously, that at some point in the sequence there is a pattern that will look like a scene from Gone With the Wind?"

I don't see why that should be true. π isn't a counter, which is what it would need to be in order to guarantee that you eventually had all the possible n-digit long strings, where n is the number of pixels in the image.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

anechoicmedia says:

since π is infinite all the writings of man and all the media we have ever generated are contained in the sequence known as pi
it is not a random number; we just haven't found any patterns in it that we recognize yet...
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

RJL20 says:

"infinite" doesn't necessarily mean "contains all possibilities". The sequence of all even numbers (246810121416182022...) is infinite, but the number "17" doesn't appear in it anywhere.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

jedwards says:

"π isn't a counter, which is what it would need to be in order to guarantee that you eventually had all the possible n-digit long strings, where n is the number of pixels in the image."

If (and this is an open question, but it's most likely true) pi is normal, than it eventually contains every finite string. Read Wagon, S. . "Is Pi normal?",The Mathematical Intelligencer, 7(3), (1985), p 65-67.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

RJL20 says:

Hmm, good point. I'd forgotten that π is probably normal. Not provably so, at least not yet. But, yeah, I guess π could be a universe factory. But it isn't necessarily one. And it certainly isn't one just because it's infinite.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

ewedistrict says:

Jonah you basically just shut this conversation down when you started citing your references. That's my boy.

pkmaximoo: you're right and I'd considered this, but omitted it for brevity's sake. One simple way to account for this is to assume there is a recognizable imagine in plain black-and-white resembling Gone With The Wind in a binary expansion of pi, in the smallest possible imagine (which I contend is about 200 by 300 pixels). So the number we're dealing with is 2^60000.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Half-Mad says:

What about using a non ten based system. There might be an image somewhere in there using base 8, base 12, or something.

Unlikely, but there could be.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

mrpattersonsir says:

you have too much time on your hands
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

cardhouse says:

Hey Mr. Patterson, you want to clue us all in to what we should be doing? Because you seem to have some idea. Or is that just one of those reflexive statements from people who can't appreciate that other people might have ... other interests?
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

mrpattersonsir says:

i sense you might have judged me, cardhouse. you are wrong.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

esherril says:

The Flickr icons are only 48 x 48 (2304 pixels) and we could probably recognize a still frame of GWTW or nearly any other movie in that space. Of course in plain black & white that makes for only 2^2304 unique combinations... or 3.74*10^693 possible frames. Still a pretty big search space.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Nicholas Sideras says:

"but the number '17' doesn't appear in it "

what about when you get to, say, 172 ?

[/nitpick]

Seriously, though, this is neat. There's some crazy things you could do with this...what's the average color? if you manipulate the length of the rows, what appears? etc

Also related to the data contained in pi ispi search.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

ankhank says:

You see a cursive n? I see what's probably the same shape but it looks like a question mark, rotated slightly anticlockwise.

Wish we had this in a frame that could be shifted in length/width and skewed. There must be some proportion in which it the sequence looks like there's some pattern.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

RJL20 says:

nick: yeah, I thought of that later. Oops. The point is still valid, though, despite my poor phrasing. The number 17 doesn't appear anywhere in the infinite set of all even numbers. The string "17" may, but the number itself doesn't.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Severenuk says:

Brenda?
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

an iconoclast says:

what does it look like in black and white, with odd=black & even =white, or vice versa?
Or Primes and non primes instead of even odd?
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

Tensegrity Dan says:

That's odd, I see a bronto, T-Rex, pterodactyl, some palm trees, and a cave.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

murtlest says:

This applet lets you play with the picture:
www.endofart.net/pi/
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

e.j.a.t. says:

Cornbread are square. Pi are round.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

[P!]Wack says:

@murlest: ^_^ really great work

@all: I'm workin' in a radial version, I hope to post it in about an hour
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

[P!]Wack says:

@all: news, see the Round one

more randomness from Pi
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

sciencedave says:

Wow.

Interesting discussion, too.

The applet at endofart.net is cool, too, though I can't help reading 'endofart' as 'endo fart'. Like endohedral, or endo-exo isomerism in chemistry. Not nearly so profound as pi being a universe factory, but I'm just sayin'.

Concerning whether 17 appears in the list of even numbers, and whether that matters...clearly the string isn't excluded, like RJL20 says, but it is constrained where it can appear, that is, who its neighbors may be. Actually, this is more a question, since I lack the patience or number theoretic ability to answer the question, and maybe it's obvious to one of you math mavens.

It isn't exactly clear to me that exclusion of a given number N being any ol' place would preclude a universe factory. Dunno.
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

jordanzanatta says:

Well you know what? There is no easter bunny! Over there, that's just a guy in a suit!
Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

ewedistrict says:

"The Flickr icons are only 48 x 48 (2304 pixels) and we could probably recognize a still frame of GWTW or nearly any other movie in that space. Of course in plain black & white that makes for only 2^2304 unique combinations... or 3.74*10^693 possible frames. Still a pretty big search space."

Posted 33 months ago. ( permalink )

dvwiz says:

Could you make it a circle instead of a rectangle?
Posted 32 months ago. ( permalink )

akira117 says:

Add it to the flickr.com/groups/digg/
Posted 32 months ago. ( permalink )

Alexandre Testu says:

awesomely awesome!
Posted 32 months ago. ( permalink )

Forchilli says:

wow. pi is crazy. lol
Posted 32 months ago. ( permalink )

.: MiNA :. says:

cool , i like the idea ,it really shows that there is no pattern
Posted 22 months ago. ( permalink )

.: MiNA :. says:

if i where you i would try to learn it with SVM :D
Posted 22 months ago. ( permalink )

boyanib says:

MiNA, how would you use SVM for finding a pattern? Rather than a discriminative learner, I would use a generative one. I think you need a model, and find it (and its parameters) in the set of numbers.
Posted 19 months ago. ( permalink )

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Pi

Comments

auratus says:

zitsom says:

pyramis says:

nam20485 says:

tvongaza says:

Blood Ninja says:

ConceptJunkie says:

adameros says:

Proth says:

redindian says:

tforster says:

pmppk says:

dantekgeek says:

airship says:

pickupjojo says:

matthewstone says:

Aerotect [deleted] says:

cwith says:

jcslicer says:

__pr__ says:

bbhart says:

Dan Diemer says:

dklimke says:

Jerry Heiselman says:

iain_brklyn says:

timdavid says:

Sidnicious says:

... we'd surely invent it says:

m0l0k0 says:

windowshoppers1979 says:

TunaMan52 says:

schultzdave says:

Sidnicious says:

Todd Moon says:

GoodAtSomeStuff says:

justino! says:

yatoobin says:

Quotato says:

mechanisma22 says:

spudart says:

pipedreambomb says:

philoponia says:

absolutdeep says:

nybon says:

li1ricky says:

Findo says:

vasionok says:

cornelius1729 says:

*MB* says:

ewedistrict says:

danja. says:

pkmaximoo says:

[P!]Wack says:

tan.cooper says:

wohli [deleted] says:

jestercard says:

closethipster says:

RJL20 says:

anechoicmedia says:

RJL20 says:

jedwards says:

RJL20 says:

ewedistrict says:

Half-Mad says:

mrpattersonsir says:

cardhouse says:

mrpattersonsir says:

esherril says:

Nicholas Sideras says:

ankhank says:

RJL20 says:

Severenuk says:

an iconoclast says:

Tensegrity Dan says:

murtlest says:

e.j.a.t. says:

[P!]Wack says:

[P!]Wack says:

pr says:

MB says: