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Re:Fifteen Most Famous Transcendental Numbers by jibal on Wednesday December 31, 2025 @04:37PM (#46448624)
That's just saying that you can pick and use rational numbers (which are a subset of the reals.)
Re:Fifteen Most Famous Transcendental Numbers by skulk on Wednesday December 31, 2025 @08:06PM (#46450156)
Not really. You can simulate a probability of 1/x by expanding 1/x in binary and flipping a coin repeatedly, once for each digit, until the coin matches the digit (assign heads and tails to 0 and 1 consistently). If the match happened on 1, then it's a positive result, otherwise negative. This only requires arbitrary but finite precision but the probability is exactly equal to 1/x which isn't rational.
Re:Fifteen Most Famous Transcendental Numbers by jibal on Wednesday December 31, 2025 @10:59PM (#46451168)
No, it isn't ... an infinite expansion isn't possible.
Re:Fifteen Most Famous Transcendental Numbers by markusde on Friday January 02, 2026 @02:06PM (#46468174)
Kind of, but you're not just picking rationals, you're picking rationals that are known to converge to a real number with some continuous property.

You might be interested in this paper [1] which builds on top of this approach to simulate arbitrarily precise samples from the continuous normal distribution.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2710016