Pool & Pi

Going to the "Pool room" is a fun, specially in the mid-day repast, away from office. My history of pool is shorter than that of dinosaurs and a bit more recent than latest spring. But I guess picked it up well ;).

Pool is a game of balls, which are speherical for historical (probably date backs to the origin of time, time itself being spherical) reasons. And anyone can tell you, a sphere is a thing of fun and wonders. Things happen with them and by them, that nothing else can match quite the same. So much for their shape. Lets talk some real pool. Or should I? I think, the charm of our pool probably resides somehwere outside the pool table. The way we think are very similar, so this table gives us nothing other than one more ground to mix and melt those on a newer canvas. So after some rounds, questions started to pop out. If the projectile of a ball ( lets take the que ball for simplicity ) is not a perfect loop, will it necessarily have to fall in one of the pockets given infinte time? Intuition is misleading as always. Least we forget to get back to work ( which gives us money to play pool, which we can't play enough because we have to work to do that...dizzy? ok), we both seemed to concentrate on winning the table.

But as expected, this was perfect candidate for the afternoon brain-raining ( not quite storming you know). We realized after some initial restlessness, that we were dealing with some deep water fish here. There exist questions like "what is the maximum length of a acyclic string constructed from finite number of symbols"? And for practical example of it, we didn't have to think that far really, our good old (ms.) Pi knocked in. (For some reason, I find the sex of pi as female, let me know if you feel otherwise ;) ). To answer our previous question would be in the same complexity class where the question "is pi represenstation a recurring sequence?". I am still to google it out, but definitely the proof would be much harder than the answer.