>I was inspired by Carl Sagen's "Contract". In the book, top computers were set to working out the value of Pi to the highest degree of accuracy. Towards the end, the decimals all started to be 1s and 0s, untill their display on the VDU became a circle of 0s in a sea of 1s (or vice versa).

I can spot a dozen flaws here:
- there's no highest degree of accuracy. The decimals go ad infinitum
- hence, there can not be any end, only an end of the computer work, i.e. when they fill their disks with calculated digits (and intermediate results - megabyte long numbers that need to be multiplied, divided and added)
- any graphics emerging on a VDU depend very much on the horizontal resolution. Change it by one digit (or pixel) and your image gets skewed; change it sufficiently and you get nothing recognizable.
- why would anything have a structure that resembles a graphic representation of a circle in ASCII graphic?
- why would decimals show that? Ahy would a decimal representation be so significant? Any base has equal rights - it could be anything, binary, ternary... hexadecimal, base 64, base 299. Any pattern which appears in one representation would probably exist only in that representation and its derivatives (i.e. something looking nice in base 10 may look equally nice in base 100, just half as narrow)

OK, I'm a bit short of a dozen, but that's only in decimal. In ternary , 12(3)=5(10).