So if you could find things in pi (or any normal number) quickly enough, then any arbitrary chunk of data could be compressed to just an offset and a length into that number. That's kind of crazy to think about.
No, not compressed - the offset would always be (much) larger than the arbitrary chunk of data. It's flawed intuition to think of the information as "in" pi - it's "in" the offset, and pi is essentially a small decryption algorithm.
Don't get carried away with pi mysticism - all this stuff is also true of the concatenation of all integers in order (0123456789101112131415...).
That's brilliant. I also like that you don't need to store the offsets anywhere else, because that metadata is also just data that can itself be found in pi.
Actually, that sounds like one of the sects in Library of Babel, who tried to find the one true catalogue (or whatever it was) by looking for the book that told where it was, and the book that told where that book was, etc. There must be an infinite number of books that lead the way to the catalogue.
So if you could find things in pi (or any normal number) quickly enough, then any arbitrary chunk of data could be compressed to just an offset and a length into that number. That's kind of crazy to think about.