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Comment by pacman128 | Hacker News Reader

This brings up the thing that really bothered me about Carl Sagan's novel _Contact_. A book that I really liked otherwise.

Warning, this might be considered a spoiler:

A pattern found deep in the computed binary digits of pi are used to "prove" that the universe was created by an intelligence.

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I think this is just Carl Sagan's definition of what he (as an atheist) thinks an Almighty Deity _should_ be able to do.

I mean, being able to write an arbitrary message in a logical constant like Pi sounds harder than just merely creating the physical universe, no?

Also, your dismay of the idea sounds like a kind of Platonism: "Obviously" the logical rational reality of mathematics just is, right?

It's definitely a type of Platonism. The question isn't how hard it is, but if it's possible at all.

That probably sort of his point, I guess: a genuine God should be able to do the impossible and this is an interesting kind of impossible.

What part of this is "really bothering"?

We can make a simulation today, and have it obey such natural laws (of course programmed behavior) + logic (ditto), so that we could encode whatever we want inside a physical or geometrical constant as it appears inside the simulation.

We can't make a simulation that changes the result of infinite series. They were computing pi, not measuring it. This wasn't changing the curvature of space, it was changing math itself.

>We can't make a simulation that changes the result of infinite series.

Huh? It's trivial to do so. You just give the simulation the appropriate algebra that applies to all their measurements.

Not more difficult than setting 12=66 to programming languages that allow it (there are some, it can also be done in others like Python through some trickery [1]), and thus changing all the subsequent calculations done there.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/2441cv/can_you_chan...

I haven't read the book, but I would imagine a story where you'd have a simulation where the maker decides that whenever the humans try to find pi by squeezing a polygon between two circles, you mess with them in the small digits. Similarly for the inverse squares sum.

Yet somehow a case is missed out, and some day someone asks the VM for pi in some other way, a discrepancy is found, and there you go...

I'm not talking about physical measurements. How do you make a simulation that makes the sum of 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + ... not equal to 1.0? It really comes down to whether math is universal. Maybe it's not, but I certainly don't see a trivial way to simulate this.

that's a common trope, though. Baxter did it the Xeelee Sequence: the monads selected our particular universe "seed" bc it was amicable to life, and the proto-Xeelee and others tweaked universal constants (via unexplained methods) in the first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang that allowed for, well, us. And there's too many to list of the whole "Ancients/Precursors" who basically made intelligent life or whatever.

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