Wednesday, November 16, 2016

A walk in base-two pi

In base two, π = 11.001001000011111101101010100010001... Ignoring the decimal point and replacing every zero with minus one, we get: 1, 1, -1, -1, 1, -1, -1, 1, -1, -1, -1, -1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, -1, 1, 1, -1, 1, -1, 1, -1, 1, -1, -1, -1, 1, -1, -1, -1, 1, ... We can now treat these numbers as a one-dimensional walk on the y-axis. Accumulating: 1, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, -1, 0, -1, -2, -3, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, -1, -2, -1, ... Finally, we graph this sequence:


The picture is very much compressed, showing only one of every one hundred points. What looks like a single crossing from positive to negative territory at 10^8, plotting the values from 100000000 to 101400000 details to this:


Even this detail is lacking. What appear to be a couple of dozen y = 0 values are actually 2409 such, ranging from 100023378 to 101375384. The list of zeros constitute the terms of A039624 and I've just calculated 45915 of them.

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