Technology
Which posts fit here?
Anything that is at least tangentially connected to the technology, social media platforms, informational technologies and tech policy.
Post guidelines
[Opinion] prefix
Opinion (op-ed) articles must use [Opinion] prefix before the title.
Rules
1. English only
Title and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original link
Post URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communication
All communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. Inclusivity
Everyone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacks
Any kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangents
Stay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may apply
If something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.
Companion communities
!globalnews@lemmy.zip
!interestingshare@lemmy.zip
Icon attribution | Banner attribution
If someone is interested in moderating this community, message @brikox@lemmy.zip.
view the rest of the comments
So it is expected to be a last digit?
And what can be done with this knowledge?
Pi is transcendental. There is no last number.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_number
How zen.
I think there's proofs to show that won't happen. Don't ask me to find them or explain them, it's beyond my scope.
What I'm waiting for is them finding a repeating sequence of 1s and 0s that when arranged in a matrix form a crude circle. A message to those who can learn to find it, with more to follow.
Ah, another Contact enjoyer.
Movie was pretty good. Book was excellent.
Can't be repeating, but there could be some sort of non-repeating pattern as far as we know
I mean if pi is infinite, wouldn't that happen anyway at some point?
I don't think that's a given. It's just like there are different sizes of infinite, and more numbers between 0 and 1 than there are real numbers, or something.
That's really interesting, and matches my completely groundless intuition. Just because it could happen, even on an infinite scale, doesn't mean it would. That makes sense to me at least.
Yeah, I mean math and even science aren't always intuitive, so we have to have rules and theories to go by that demonstrate repeatability. Subatomic physics doesn't even really work like our models say, it's just that the models give the best results in predicting what we'll find.
Another example is randomness. Not all random numbers are the same, it depends on how you derive them as to what you'll get. I guess in some way that's related to what numbers will pop up for an irrational number. It's said with enough monkeys randomly typing on typewriters eventually you'll get a Shakespeare work. It already happened a number of times... since we're in sense monkeys and got a number of Shakespeare works. Didn't even need typewriters.
So it basically still boils down to a question of determinism vs, well, not free will but, I guess "indeterminism" would be a word for it. Semantics kind of break down at explaining the nature of existence at some point. I wonder if that is true for mathematics as well.
It's like that quote of Alfred Korzybski's, "the map is not the terrain". The explanation is not reality, it must by necessity be something less, or something different from it.
Pi by definition has no last digit, if it had one it would be possible to square the circle (even if it wouud require an absurd amount of precision)