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Pi Not? Mystery Cache

Hidden : 2/23/2013
Difficulty:
3.5 out of 5
Terrain:
2 out of 5

Size: Size:   small (small)

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Geocache Description:

Organize the frequency of each digit (0 thru 9) in the first million places of Pi, and solve the puzzle below.
You can find this pretty easily with a little googling... or do it yourself, (see the instructions at the bottom of the page.)



To solve the puzzle and find this cache, all you need to do is find out how often each digit from 0 thru 9 appears in the first one million decimal places of Pi.

So first, find how often each digit appears and arrange the numbers 0 thru 9 in descending order of appearance.
Then take that list you just created and number it from top to bottom with 0 thru 9.
So you should have a list with the most commong number on top, which will be represented by 0.
And you'll have the least common number on the bottom of your list, which will be represented by 9.

As you do this, you should find that the most common number turns out to be the "5", and the least common is a "6".
On your chart then, the "5" will be on top and the "6" will be on the bottom.
When you number each one from top to bottom, the "5" will be a 0, and the "6" will be a 9.

Got it?  Good!!  :)

Now using the chart you just created, decode the final coordinates of this puzzle:
N 29° 89.121, W 880° 46.864


NOTE:I was notified that according to a few websites out there, the 3 and the 4 both occur the same number of times. When I did it by hand using the Pi page linked to below that wasn't the case.
So if you see the "3" and the "4" both occur the same number of times, the correct order to solve this is "5" most common, "4" second most common, and "3" is third most common.... ;-)






Doing this on your own:

First, I tried to calculate Pi on my own and discovered it is beyond my meager abilities.  It's not impossible to do, I just couldn't do it. 
So, with permission I got the numbers from another web page and posted them here:  Pi.html

If you want, go to the Pi page and copy/paste those million digits into your own program and you can do your own counting.
Fun, huh? (Also what's fun is to scroll the page down and watch all those numbers while you pretend you're looking at the matrix!)

I pasted them into MS Word expecting it to choke but it handled them just fine and was even able to tell me how many of each digit there was.  Very cool!!
On my Windows computer I use Notepad++ as a notepad replacement and I tried it too, and it handled all 1 million numbers with no problems.  It too had a feature under "Find" that counted each digit for me.  Also very cool!!

So using my text editor I was able to count each number from 0 thru 9 and see which one occurred most often.  It took only a couple of minutes.

Good luck with this, and cache on!




Additional Hints (No hints available.)