Can any finite bit string be found in pi within a reasonable amount of time? [closed]

Expanding on my comments. There’s a very important concept here that’s called information entropy.

Out of full disclosure, I’m the current world record holder of the digits of Pi at 10 trillion digits (10^13).

I have approximately 10,000 copies of everyone’s social security number.

However that doesn’t mean I can just hack into everyone’s accounts and steal their identities. Because I don’t know where each person’s SSN starts. And for a typical 9-digit SSN, the first digit in Pi where that SSN will appear will be on the order of 9 digits long. In other words, the information about the SSN is kept in the address rather than in Pi itself.


For example, if someone has the SSN: 938-93-3556

It starts at offset 597,507,393 in Pi. That number 597,507,393 is about as long as the SSN itself. In other words, we’ve gained nothing by using Pi.

(I’m not sure if there’s an earlier offset where it appears, but the probability decreases exponentially with smaller offsets.)


To generalize this, even if you had infinite digits of Pi (which theoretically holds all possible information), the address that holds data XXX will (with extreme probability) be as large as XXX itself.

In other words, the information is not held in the digits of Pi itself, but rather the address where the information starts.

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