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Gigapixel Tapestries & Gigadecimal Pi
RobotWisdom writes "The new New Yorker magazine has posted two long non-technical articles about the Chudnovsky brothers and their homebrew supercomputers. One is a 1992 article about how they calculated pi to over two billion decimal places using a $70,000 cluster with 16 nodes. The other is a brandnew piece about how they spent months creating a seamless multi-gigabyte image of a fifteenth century tapestry for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tapestries are essentially pixel-art on a non-rigid (cloth) matrix, so the manual labor of photographing it inch by inch had introduced many tiny deformations in the images, which they had to mathematically iron out. Old lo-res pix of the tapestries are on the Met's site, pix of the brothers are in the world brain."
Link?
:)
"This is Zombo Com, and welcome to you who have come to Zombo Com" - www.zombo.com
Is this another April Fools article?
David told me that they were working with I.B.M. to design what may be the world's most powerful supercomputer. The machine, code-named C64, is being built for a United States government agency.
I mean, I loved my C64 too, but it's no supercomputer.
...was breaking the tapestry's copy protection. Starting in the 14th century, nobility decreed all tapestries contain a pattern of knotting designed to prevent any scanning or printing of tapestries. By the end of the 14th century, all scanner and printer manufacturers had added this anti-tapestry copying technology into their products.
One is a 1992 article about how they calculated pi to over two billion decimal places
;)
Hrmm.. They should've just rounded down?
David informed her that the brothers would need to obtain the complete set of raw data from the Leica camera. The next day, he went to the museum and collected, from Bridgers, two large blue Metropolitan Museum shopping bags stuffed with more than two hundred CDs, containing every number that the Leica had collected from the Unicorn tapestries. There were at least a hundred billion numbers in the shopping bags.
Bags...and...bags...of numbers!
And now for something completely different...a man with three buttocks.
"Here is a circle, with its diameter:"
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Who cares whether they calculated Pi to n-billion digits? Who cares if they photographed the tapestries to the precision of an atom??
The important question that needs to be answered is: how did they end up with wives who (a) work; (b) don't force these two nerds to work; and (c) let them buy all the toys they need? Where can I get a wife like this??
Pfft. There's another mile (and change) of Manhattan north of the cloisters.
Either that, or my apartment is actually in Yonkers and I should be paying a lot less rent.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.