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Reminds me of nsafs, the National Security Agency Filesystem ("free" because the government pays for it) - https://github.com/freedomtools/nsafs
It is worth noting that as the length of data increases it becomes extremely unlikely that the index and length of the sequence within pi would actually be smaller than the data.
Related. Others?
πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36357466 - June 2023 (107 comments)
πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699499 - Sept 2021 (30 comments)
PiFS – The Data-Free Filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26208704 - Feb 2021 (1 comment)
Πfs: Never worry about data again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21359338 - Oct 2019 (1 comment)
The π Filesystem for FUSE: Store Your Data in π - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19223032 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)
pifs - Avoid disk space usage by saving your files in the digits of Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18687275 - Dec 2018 (1 comment)
πfs – A data-free filesystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869691 - March 2017 (105 comments)
Πfs: Stores your data in π - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856108 - Jan 2016 (1 comment)
Πfs: Never worry about data again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847693 - Jan 2016 (1 comment)
File system that stores location of file in Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8018818 - July 2014 (98 comments)
100% Compression Using Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6698852 - Nov 2013 (32 comments)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
Reminds me of: https://www.spronck.net/sloot.html
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System
>One of the properties that π is conjectured to have is that it is normal
conjectured
Glad to see one of my pet points of pedantry come up. No non-constructed irrational number has never been proven to be normal or disjunctive.
This is disturbing to realize that pi then contains all the past and future knowledge, including when I'll pass away.
I vaguely remember an entry to a compression-benchmark that gamed the benchmark by treating the filename as part of the input to the decompression-algorithm, thus beating the metric that only measured the size of the file.
> In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π.
Considering each individual bit separately would be even more performant: you only need the indexes 2 and 33, and there is an efficient mapping of those to the bits in storage.
Finally, someone is doing something about the rising prices of storage!
Just a heads up, this is writing 16 bits for every 8 bits of input:
https://github.com/philipl/pifs/blob/fded8bf7b8f4fc64233e37b...
Love it! This feels very much in the spirit of Tom7's Harder Drive [1]
isn't this relying on properties that aren't proven about pi? it needs to be disjunctive or normal, and neither of those are proven
https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/53737/1704
> Matches that occur early enough in π to attain significant compression will not be varied. That is, it isn't possible to use π to compress interesting, real-world data because real-word strings are unlikely to arise early.
I... I can't tell if this is an elaborate troll or pure genius. I love it.
Someone should make a service "where in the pi am I" then you could use it as a short link. Then there will be hardware accelerated pi chips. All computers will come with pi preinstalled.
Short Storage Number - SSN
0x123456789ABCDEF0
use this number as a shorter nibble storage alternative...
This is probably a dumb question, but do we actually know that pi has an infinite number of decimal digits or are we assuming that it does because we haven’t developed a sufficiently powerful computer to calculate the last digit of pi?
I’m guessing this is something that could be formally proven?
I'm intrigued that π was capitalized to Π presumably automatically in the HN headline.
Has there been attempts to prove the conjecture?
I built something with a similar spirit for Pi day: https://pi.yassi.dev/
Funnily enough I’m reading Service Model and just got to the bit in the Library Archive, which has a very similar vibe to this project. Love it
This is why I got pi tattooed. It's a tattoo of all tattoos.
I’d guess even the index in pi for my phone number would be more digits than the phone number.
So not really a compression scheme.
I've simplified it and made it more flexible
3._1_415926535897932384626433832795_0_288419716939
> Why is this thing so slow? It took me five minutes to store a 400 line text file!
> Well, this is just an initial prototype, and don't worry, there's always Moore's law!
Seriously? They're only storing individual bytes in pi:
> In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π.
So the whole transformation should be trivially reducible to a 256-element lookup table from source byte to location in pi and a similar table used to convert back the other way. Maybe a fancy formula could be used for the (never actually encountered) case in which a byte is encoded by one of the infinite available noncanonical encodings.
At what point is the metadata larger than the actual file?
Posted many times before: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl
My favourite issue being about GDPR compliance https://github.com/philipl/pifs/issues/56
It is actually not proven that the decimal expansion (or any rational base expansion) of pi contains all possible sequences of numbers. It sounds like it intuitively would be since the expansion is infinite, but it is not necessarily true. For example, the number 0.101001... (i.e., decimal formed by concatenating N zeros and then 1 for all N 0 to infinity) is infinite, never-ending, and irrational but does not contain every sequence of numbers.
absolutely genius
Why would anyone need πfs, since you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially on Linux.
What a brilliant idea! Of course, of course, it’s not in the repository so I can’t apt-get install it. Debian...always so far behind.
Horrible. Brilliant. Love it.
Looked at the repo but it says NOTHING about what value this project offers.
I mean, I get that it's "fun" to store information within the digits of pi. But is this just amusement, or is there a value prop for production use here?
(Speaking as a math major, by the way. I'm sympathetic to the cause.)
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This is interesting, but I feel like my use cases would better align with a different irrational number. Could I get an option to do this with e instead? /s
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Reminds me of when I tried to use the library of babel as a data compression tool. It led me down a fun rabbit hole and was my first introduction to information theory.
The conclusion being that you basically need the same amount of data to represent the address of your data as the data itself, so it's not really effective at compression, just a fun thought experiment.
The cool part of this in modern times is that LLMs are basically a form of lossy compression that actually achieves the gist of what these tools fail at. Although it is lossy, and requires a massive substrate. This is related to the idea of AI/LLMs being a form of language compression.