Pi: It Just Keeps On Going

dominic7 sent us a link on the National Post about a new record for "knowing" Pi. Using the ol' distributed approach, a math major in Canada has found the quadrillionth binary digit of pi. It's a zero.

Comments

Oh my God!

[Red Moose]

This is like, a change moment in mankind's science.......a paradigm shift; it will change the world as we know it. Suddenly, computers will be faster, people will stop needlessly shooting each other, and McDonald's will serve Egg & Bacon McMuffin's *all* day....

DAMMIT!

[Pfhreakaz0id]

I had $50 on "1"!
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No, that will never happen

[donutello]

Pi has been proven to be irrational. You can't perform this exercise hoping to find a sequence because you never will.

Fun things to do with Pi

[Greyfox]

Take checksums of all the metallica MP3s and start a distributed project to search pi for them. Since pi is both infinite and random, they've gotta be in there somewhere. Once you know where they are in pi, you can compress the songs to however many bits are needed to express the first and last positions in pi. Since we can calculate pi starting at an arbitrary location, playing the song would just be a matter of piping bytes in from your calculation program (given the start and end locations) to your MP3 player.

In other news, the RIAA gets a restraining order against PI.

Re:PI and complexity

[Nagash]

So the conclusion is that there are no numbers that cannot be described in a hundred words.

Counterexample:

There is a number that is greater than zero, but less than two, which,
when taking the set of Natural numbers to not include zero is less
than or equal to evey other number in the set. It is also the
identity element in the group that defines multiplication, which means
it is its own inverse. Often, it denotes the boolean value true and
finishing ahead of anyone else in a competition. Prime numbers are
divisible only by themselves and the number in question. It can be
drawn in a single stroke and is also known as the loneliest number.

I think you meant to say there is no number we can't describe in less than 100 words. =)

Woz

Re:Now all we need...

[Wiggin]

Yeah, but you would need a *really* steady hand...

Re:Errr...

[cperciva]

Well, I'm not in the US, I'm in Canada, so you can trust me ;)

Seriously though, if you want to check up on me, I can send you all of the intermediate results (partial sums of the sequence), and you can 1. verify that they add up to the result I gave, and 2. take partial sums at random and verify that they are correct.

A complete triple-check of the results would only take 600,000 cpu hours, actaully, so you could even do that if you like.

Now all we need...

[Pru]

All you need to draw a circle around the entire visable universe that devieates from perfect circularity by only the width of one proton. IS 56 DIGITS OF PI.

But Pi does give us a good benchmark for computing sometimes.

Enough of this irrational nonsense!

[Black Parrot]

Vote for me, and I'll set e=2.0, pi=3.0, and extrapolate the rest of the number line from there.

I recognize that that won't fix everything, but at least it will bring two of the worst freaks of nature into line with what the citizens expect from their number system.

Oh well done

[stx23]

A binary digit of Pi is zero? What a surprise.
I'll predict that of the next quadrillion binary digits, approx. 50% will be zero, and approx. 50% will be one.
Right, where's my slashdot story?

Re:Do we know pi is of infinite length?

[Kotetsu]

Yes. Pi has been proven to be a trancendental number, that is a number which cannot be expressed as a root of a finite polynomial equation. Trancendental numbers have been proven as a class to be non-terminating and non-repeating.

History of Pi calculations

[interiot]

This page gives a history of Pi calculations on computers.

From '49 to '83, the calculated length gained an order of magnitude roughly every 10 years.

From '83 to '97, one order of magnitude roughly every 5 years.

From '97 on, an order of magnitude every 2 years.
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