"Woe upon thee who hast seen things not meant for man to see..."

Mathematicians have long concerned themselves with the decimal expansion of Everyone's Favorite Mathematical Constant, Pi. The currently claimed record is 51.3 billion digits (That's 51 Gigabytes in raw form).

So, that's been done. Seth and I don't have the kind of computing power necessary to beat that record, but we do have Twisted Minds, and we came up with an interesting idea: Take the decimal expansion of Pi, and using whatever dubious methods we can come up with, convert the digits into a stream of letters, and try to make some sense of the letters.

Statistically, the decimal expansion of Pi (henceforth "Pi") is about as random as it gets. The distribution of the digits is nearly perfectly even. In other words, any method for trying to find intelligence in Pi is as likely to be successful as trying to find intelligence in a random stream of numbers.

However, this also means that with enough digits, almost any message will appear eventually.

Pi -- as with all math -- is Truth. Pi and its decimal expansion will exist long after humans are gone; even to the end of the universe. Aliens billions of light years away will calculate the same value for Pi. It is a discovery, not an invention -- and so finding a message in Pi would be a discovery profound beyond comprehension.

The purpose of this page is to give other people source code and resources for searching Pi (and now the online server!), and to post our somewhat unexciting results (or exciting results if we ever get any!).

Here is our first try, using Tom's C program (see below). This program converts 5 digits into 20 bits, and then converts that into 4 characters (characters 27-32 become spaces). Here is what the output looks like (just the very beginning):

cqkzezjvrf teocgezbtqmtzkauiiglrne zg iqlaqjoskelerqpaleayugecezqyuagsbfgqqrobtzqikibbsrgkbdazshbe eiyevkbmcemlsknmubajijairoricqqicoamtquqravkzmrdcffejksjqhamwiquicclvmzmtgrdbfbdvmsbdg dhqmlfe jadeerivsikzusgrqdjbqqivbsmzeccm tmbzgajeriettojcyoadgayyvlcaxjcavecjasyucsjkasfyvgzbwpcjfsa aaejtauyfjcbaizsscocbi krsqkrcyeugmcxe bwk mvsgktbeqymeltqgjsmelzgecrdbkia cgen zmj jkzzvdccxkjzerejcpe bqmarssistazwom ciqdfmzbqqybbhfeumokserzxdedqef ymckdoatxau sc lwfeyxm jdqrtuqgcgozuuaujsaacwqetriutdkyeco cxoe cov ysyeronrxc dscrueicibejevgqybizkjlbjxcbihsitzncjfrerviiazsvqreeuqeglaqzadiqmblgatmklxi ytbglakgdqoiitjgmztgbxff ajgkrawltc zicyewggczkaselfcvgruqqmbgijjcgcbfgncgqubveymtcgeboeaqaaytpa hkkeglb tgiedqfbamfyxozuri ydlgbfgsiefb vi dtcfmvmkddrarvg dvsn rsv ydblxqbjsc jcnadgcmabsj hmyirswijefscagmjhaevevzacbsuqwdde egle bkm bqj wqiydagksanjqdbjjncmvo cewmucoereslsc sqndzcmkrkv ik scivava kzkcbjkmyrnbqxe cvrcihkcmdqf umn gje tdesvaycabetxaftrcoiatbeieqasqwbwcybvmnyhmyaqi ibqgkcsvkzmgmjiz hqn esrecku zo

Possible variations:

• Move the 26 characters through different spots in the 32 possible values (6 variations if contiguous^*)
• Perform a bitwise NOT on the bits as they come through (2 variations)
• Reverse the alphabet (2 variations)
• Total: 24 variations to try

Tom's C program, pi2.c can test all of these variations. You can also download the executable pi2.exe (needs a DOS extender if you're not running under Win 95) if you don't have the facilities to compile C programs.

If you want to download the programs and test at home, you will need some pi digits -- check out 50 megabytes worth (in smallish files). You will need gzip (PC) to unzip them (do "gzip -d file.gz"). If you use the first file (3.1415...), remember to remove the "3." at the beginning, as we are testing only the decimal part of Pi. If you don't want to go out of your way, you can download 10,000 digits of Pi (about 10k). Go for it! Prove God exists, or find the Secret To The Universe (or just find 'beer' and be satisfied like Seth did!)

We are especially interested if you can search for words or phrases in languages other than English.

If you come up with any interesting results, please Tell us! (ImightbeTM@aol.com) Don't forget to mention which options you used, and which part of Pi you searched!

^*If noncontiguous but in alphabetical order, we have 906192 possible variations, if we choose any distribution within the 32 spaces, we get 3.65 x 10³² different permutations!

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This date line last updated on 1 September 1997