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by dekhn 2659 days ago
pi is effectively randomly distributed (I don't know if this is proven) which means it would be effectively impossible to compress is using conventional entropy or dictionary based techniques.

However, there are compact formulas which can generate pi to arbitrary precision, trading off compute time with space. So it;'s effectively compressible, I guess this relates to Kolomogorov complexity in some way.
1 comments
yjftsjthsd-h 2659 days ago
If it's stored as ASCII/UTF8 text, then it will be compressible because it's just numbers. On the other hand, if they somehow have a number format that spans that many digits then it'll already be perfectly efficient.
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dekhn 2659 days ago
Um, sure. But I don't think anybody really cares if pi is compressible because it's ASCII representation of numbers. At best, you'd be getting some constant factor improvement due to the unused bits, but there's nothing specific to pi in that.
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