Posted by Steve on 09/20/05 16:44

> Just compress the file with the zlib functions. The compression routine
> will squeeze out most of the redundancy.

OT: Chung, I was about to tell you off for suggesting that an
irrational number like PI could be compressed but... luckily I paused
for a moment, and googled this
<http://thestarman.dan123.com/math/pi/picalcs.htm> that shows better
than 50% compression rates. So that told me.

Back to the OP, where you go from here depends entirely on what your
search algorithm is doing at the moment with the string version of PI.
If it is a brute force dumb search, it will not need much modification
but it will be slow.

You need to pack the search substring first in the same way as your PI
digits. You probably have to do a minimum of two searches: one to look
for odd-aligned substrings and one to look for even-aligned substrings.
Doing a search with a substring starting or ending on an odd-aligned
digit also means managing the "don't care" digits. You might be able to
devise a suitable regexp to handle all of this. Best of luck. Can you
tell me if my birthday is in there (19590318)?

---
Steve

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