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Pi: It Just Keeps On Going

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the distributed-"usefulness" dept.

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.

6 of 323 comments (clear)

  1. DAMMIT! by Pfhreakaz0id · · Score: 5

    I had $50 on "1"!
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    DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
  2. Fun things to do with Pi by Greyfox · · Score: 5
    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.

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    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  3. Re:Now all we need... by Wiggin · · Score: 5

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

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    "I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
  4. Re:Errr... by cperciva · · Score: 5

    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.

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    Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  5. Now all we need... by Pru · · Score: 5

    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.

  6. Oh well done by stx23 · · Score: 5

    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?