83,431 Recited Digits of Pi

i_like_spam writes "59-year-old Akira Haraguchi of Japan recently broke the world record for the recited number of digits of Pi. Haraguchi-san recited an amazing 83,431 digits of Pi during a 13-hour overnight stretch. This almost doubles the previous record of 42,195 digits by fellow Japanese Hiroyuki Goto. Though it is not yet updated to reflect the new record, the Pi-World-Ranking-List has the rules for participation and breaks down the ranking by world, continent, and country. Links to world rankings for memorized digits of E and Sqrt(2) are also given."

Comments

Rank list goes down to 50?

[slavemowgli]

Why does the rank list go down to 50 digits? Surely there are many people in the world who can recite more than 50 digits of pi that aren't listed here, so unless these people are noteworthy for some other reason, their inclusion seems a bit pointless.

Wait a minute?

[FhnuZoag]

How do you know they are reciting, and not actually working it all out as they go along?

Re:Wait a minute?

[GigsVT]

Not sure if you were kidding or not.

Solving Pi algorithmically in your head would be a larger feat than memorizing it.

That's a slow storage device

[G4from128k]

83,431 digits is about 33.8 kB of data. Read out over 13 hours means the data rate averages under 6 baud -- and I thought 110 baud modem on a teletype was slow.

I don't even want to think about the write speed of this storage device. At least the storage capacity of the device has nearly doubled (from 42,195 digits or 17.1 kB).

Re:That's a slow storage device

[BioCS.Nerd]

Interesting post :) Just to throw my $0.02 in, the vocal cords and ears can act as a bottle neck skewing the actual rates of data transport.

Re:That's a slow storage device

[Anonymous Coward]

The obvious solution, then, is to put multiple hu-mans together in a RAID setup.

Re:That's a slow storage device

[Anonymous Coward]

It's tricky to try and compare computer storage with brain storage.

For example, I have a program that when compiled is only a couple hundred bytes yet it can calculate pi out a million digits and more.

The brain uses similar "tricks" to do what it does. It's not all about storage.

Re:Google it

[tehshen]

Beating google by 999992 decimal places :)

My Law

[MyLongNickName]

A person has a fixed amount of mental capability. This capability is divided into three categories:
1) Memorization
2) Logical Thinking
3) Wasted watching 'Surivor'.

The more time you spend on #1, the less you have for #2 and #3. The more on #2, the less for #1 and #3. The more on #3, the less for #1 and #2.

Note that Albert Einstein was not considered to have a super high IQ by "world changing genius" standards. But the dude could not even remember his phone number or address. Clearly he robbed #1 to get more #2.

I am not sure what this counselor's total intelligence is. But she sure wasted precious brain cells on something that is irrelevant (3.141592654 gives you the circumference of the earth to within a centimeter given its diameter), and easily looked up.

Re:My Law

[Cow Jones]

But she sure wasted precious brain cells on something that is irrelevant (3.141592654 gives you the circumference of the earth to within a centimeter given its diameter), and easily looked up.

You're missing the point - this is not about doing something useful, it's about proving that it can be done by a human. For the same reason people hold sports competitions: that somebody can jump 2.40 meters high is also irrelevant per se, but it sure is an impressive thing for a human to do.

Your theory about the 3 capacities is interesting, but as it stands, it's just that: a theory. I for one think it is more likely that the brain can be trained, and through training can expand its capacity. Certainly the concentration required to memorize large numbers will be beneficial when we try to think logically.

Sig. Figs

[TerranFury]

Ever heard of significant figures? Show me a sensor that can return values with 83,431 digits of precision!

NASA got to the moon with fewer than 12 digits of Pi...

Re:Miscalculation?

[BJH]

Numbers from 1-10 in Japanese each have a reading associated with them (1=hi, 2=fu, 3=mi...) that makes it easier to form them into mnemonics than in English.

So it wasn't as hard as it looked - he just memorised an 83,431 syllable mnemonic.

Brain cells are never wasted

[Anonymous Coward]

There's never been evidence of someone learning so much that they couldn't learn any more. No double majors in physics and medicine who eventually become doctors wake up one morning at thirty to discover, mon dieu! It's impossible to remember anything new!

Certainly memories degrade, but that decay seems to be entirely linked to age.

Indeed, it seems like people who memorize more start to learn *faster,* because they have information they can relate other information to. If you know an 80,000 digit number sequence, all sorts of sequences are going to be immediately familiar. "That's a lot like 592307816," you say of someone's last name. Why does the last name remind you of that sequence? It's hard to say, but it does, and that helps you remember the name.

In this way it works like many compression schemes. Storing a small amount of data gets a worse compression ratio than a large amount, because in the larger amount there's more duplication that can be referenced.

If there's anything "wasted" here, it's time, not brain cells. Brain cells seem to be infinitely capable of learning, but we know that a lifetime is viciously finite. Many digits of pi may improve your memorization skills to a certain extent, but clearly memorizing eighty thousand words is likely to help you more because words are more associable. Memorizing Shakespeare's plays provides a thousand apt quotes and analogies for all occasions, instead of just improving sequencing ability.

That said, it's not like there aren't worse wastes of time that don't improve you at all.

83,431th digits

[angio]

The last digits, according to the pi searcher, are 315921943469. Now you too can recite them -- just make up a lot of numbers in the middle and hope the judges get bored!

insight to brain operation?

[mminbiole]

It seems like all that data would help decode how things are stored and recalled in the brain. 83 thousand numbers is orders of magnitude longer than that would be held by the average brain. Would someone's brain who stores a long string of patternless numbers exhibit a different structure? Would the amount of blood flow during recital be significantly different than someone recalling a 7 digit phone number?

Anything beyond several decimal places is useless.

[Anonymous Coward]

See quote below:

"Conceive a sphere constructed with the earth at it center, and imagine it surface to pass through Sirius, which is 8.8 light years distant from the earth... Then imagine this enormous sphere to be so packed with microbes that in every cubic millimeter millions and millions of these diminutive animalcula are present. Now conceive these microbes to be unpacked and so distributed singly along a straight line that every two microbes are as far distant from each other as Sirius is from us... Conceive the long line thus fixed by all the microbes at the diameter of a circle, and imagine its circumference to be calculated by multiplying it diameter by Pi to 100 decimal places. Then, in the case of a circle of this enormous magnatude even, the circumference so calculated would not vary from the real circumference by a millionth part of a millimeter.

This example will suffice to show that the calculation of Pi to 100 or 500 decimal places is wholly useless."

- Hermann Schubart, A mathematics professor from Hamburg, Germany in 1889

Source:
http://www.asofyet.org/muppet/humor/uselesspi.html

this is interesting.

[KH]

I'm a Japanese. Once in my junior high days (7th grade for you 'mericans), I got so bored with the math class that I decided to memorize Pi on the textbook. It had something like 47 digits. It took no time and during that 45 minutes session, I memorized it. I still seem to remember it.

Curiously, the Pi World Ranking List had meny Japanese and Indian names. This is sort of understandable. Both cultures used to emphasize on memorizing texts for a long long time. Up until my grandfather's generation, being educated meant being able to recite the whole Confucius, and some other assorted Chinese classics. In my schooldays, too, we were forced to memorize bunch of stuff that turned out to be useless (pi was not one of them though :). Coming up with a mnemonic is kinda part of culture. The way I used to memorize pi was to cut it at every four digits and try to associate some kind of logic with each chunk. For example, 3.14 1592 6535 8979 3238 4626 each of four digit groups seems to have some kind of pattern, except the first one, no?

In India, too, traditional education for Brahmins started as memorizing the Veda transmitted to their family. There still are some people who can recite a whole Veda. Those people tended to memorize other stuff as well.

Probably for the Japanese and Indians, memorizing some long strings that don't make sense is not that a strange thing.

By the way, I am a Sanskritist, not a mathematician.

Re:this is interesting.

[javabandit]

I disagree.

Memorizing PI is key to understanding what PI means. If you can't remember what PI is... how can you calculate the circumference of a circle?

Memorization is the key to learning. How can you begin to understand P&S geometry without memorizing the theorems?

Lets not forget that being able to REMEMBER (or memorize) what you have learned is necessary. Otherwise, you have to learn things over and over again.

Like it or not, we are creatures of habit, pattern recognition, and memorization.

Re:Miscalculation?

[danharan]

Check out the Mnemonic alphabet.

Take a series of letters, makes nouns, create your own poem or story. Link words and phrases with absurd images (the more absurd, the better), and you suddenly can remember long series of numbers.

Got ears? this is how you do it

[afinemetsfan]

The easy way to memorize a long number is to convert the digits into musical notes, its easier to memorize a song then a list of numbers. so 0 would be a C and 1 would be a D , ect. ect.

Re:Miscalculation?

[mbrewthx]

Hey Mods, Mod parent UP!!!!!!

My son has Aspergers sysdrome, Which is a type of Autism) and I can see him doing this. He memorizes movies, by chapter and time. With his Star Wars movies he can see a small clip and tell you the chapter and time on the DVD, and that is light weight lifting for him. It's not a photographic memory but like a database which him can sort and link with other databases in his mind and do it extremely fast. I'm going to start teaching him a programming language this summer and a Linux box to his desk.

Remember that the the Autism spectrum is very broad and goes from people who need to be in institutions and on the of side of the sprectrum those who we would consider just a excentric.
I know we just think about Rain Man when we hear Austism.

We need to look past that and see the potential, My son is only 8 and yes he can be frustrating at times but I can't wait to see what he can do in the future.

Well I got to go. Have a list to finish
1)Buy matching suits for son and I
2)go to Vegas and play Black JAck
3) ?
4) PROFIT!!!!