At this rate, finding the last digit is probably just a few years down the road.

    • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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      1 day ago

      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.

        • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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          23 hours ago

          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.

          • tomiant@piefed.social
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            23 hours ago

            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.

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              23 hours ago

              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.

              • tomiant@piefed.social
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                23 hours ago

                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.

    • Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      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)