[GeorgeKangas]

That part of the book (Contact) really bugged me.

The definition of pi is what determines the digits of pi, FULL STOP. There's no room whatsoever, for any sort of agent to 'leave a message' in those digits. I would think even a full-on theist would be embarrassed to suggest otherwise.

[dragonwriter]

> The definition of pi is what determines the digits of pi, FULL STOP. There's no room whatsoever, for any sort of agent to 'leave a message' in those digits.

All the agent needs to do is design or adjust the life forms it wants to find the message so that they are inclined to choose a numeric base in which the right sequence appears in the digits of π. The definition of π defines it's value, but the sequence of digits doesn't just depend on the value, but also the choice of base.

[randallsquared]

The Babylonians used based 60 for at least some things, but even that seems unwieldy, and even taking everything in between as equally useful provides only 58 distinct sequences of digits in pi.

The control implied is basically the power to create all the universes laws (and the math we can learn in it) from scratch.

[eslaught]

I haven't read the book, but...

Aren't the digits of pi randomly distributed? So then, you can encode literally any message you want by picking an offset into them. Could even design a "compression" algorithm where a message is designated by its offset, though I'm guessing it won't be very efficient in practice.

[BalinKing]

https://github.com/philipl/pifs

[saagarjha]

It’s suspected but not proven that pi is normal.

[prvc]

Me too. The suggestion that logic itself could be a contingent part of the universe (best mechanism for making something like this true) just seems wrong, and is anti-scientific, in any case. Not sure how to dispose of the idea, though, hence the unease.