Re:A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
by potench on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @05:54AM
(#17661055)
Wow, isn’t there a really low probability of finding your phone number in the first 200m digits of pi? (0.09995% in first 100m) I’m tempted to start throwing a dictionary of phone numbers through this pi lookup to find your number, call you, and verify, I think you could quickly narrow in on your phone number given the information above.
Re:A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
by OscarCunningham on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @06:17AM
(#17661176)
I think you'll have trouble. Assuming the first digit of the phone number is somewhere between 114.5 million and 115.5 million, you have 1 million potential 11 digit numbers to check.
There are 10^11 sequences with 11 digits. The number of people in the USA is 3×10^8, and we can assume there is roughly 1 number per person (some people don't have a phone number and some people have more than one, but it turns out that the exact approximation won't matter unless we're a few of orders of magnitude off). So about 0.3% of 11 digit sequences are valid phone numbers.
So there are approximately 0.3% × 1000000 = 3000 people with phone numbers around the 115 millionth digit of pi. You have no way of knowing which one of those people is sjcsjc.
Re:A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
by maxerickson on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @07:52AM
(#17661624)
It'd be a great 1 person-audience magic trick to call up all 3000 of those people and say, "Hi sjcsjc, I found your phone number in Pi".
Re:A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
by feintruled on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @12:00PM
(#17663724)
Derren Brown did a great series of tricks based on probability.. your comment reminded me on the one that showed a video of him flipping 10 heads in a row on an unbiased coin. He revealed them that he had done it by flipping a coin for hours until he got that sequence.
Re:A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
by maxerickson on Thursday August 02, 2018 @10:03PM
(#17676841)
Teller has made a similar statement, about practicing something more than anyone would find reasonable, so the trick is just in being able to do it.
My 11 digit phone number occurs around the 115 millionth digit, a grand saving of two digits.