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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."
Haraguchi-san recited an amazing 83,431 digits of Pi during a 13-hour overnight stretch. This more than doubles the previous record of 42,195 digits by fellow Japanese Hiroyuki Goto.
Um, I'm not a math major, but since when is 83,431 > 84,390, which is double the amount of 42,195? You don't even need a calculator to figure that one out. But as far as the accomplishment goes: That's a simply amazing feat, I applaud Haraguchi greatly, How do you memorize a number that deep, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
She only recited 10, the other numbers were just dupes.
A 59-year-old Japanese psychiatric counselor set a world record of sorts Sunday by reciting "pi," or the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, to 83,431 digits.
Good, now she can counsel herself on having more exciting things to do than learning and reciting the digits of a number anyone of us can look up.
see a Text Widget
When i think of hobbies, learning a sequence of 83,000 digits sounds like a good time.
For the beginning reciters among us, we at least still have a nice t-shirt with the first 4493 digits of Pi in the shape of the Pi symbol.
see a Text Widget
Some would say that 3.1459 is more than enough.
(I tried to hold back - I really did)
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.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
The worlds longest list of virgins has been found
How do you know they are reciting, and not actually working it all out as they go along?
Wait..er...the odds of him actually having a girlfriend are 83,431 to 1.
When I think of people. I think that there are a lot of them. More than 6 billion actually. It would seem that there is enough people that there would be people doing all kinds of things, including memorizing digits of Pi. I'm sure there is also a whole underground group of people who memorize digits of e and are disgruntled because the pi memorizing people get more attention.
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).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Not with Pi, but for example with 1/3 and even with 2/3!
bash.org #98
i don't have hard drives. i just keep 30 chinese teenagers in my basement and force them to memorize numbers
Direct away from face when opening.
Beating google by 999992 decimal places :)
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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...
Lawyer: Mr. Nahasapeemapetilon, have you ever forgotten anything?
Apu: No. In fact, I can recite pi to 50,000 places. The last digit is 1.
Homer: Mmmm.... Pi.
You think that's funny? Then please explain to me why, for example, devoting your life to run 100 meters faster than any other human is not considered funny? Is it because the latter pays unbelievably well if you succeed? Laugh all you want but frankly, I don't see much of a difference...
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
It's a good thing we have people to do this so computers don't have to.
This is the math section? I love it.
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.
To do my backups!
1 0010111 10100111010101011101011010101110101010111001010010 10101010111010101010101001010010001011010100101001 01010101010101010101010101010110111001110100101010 01010101010001010101010101010101101010001010110101 00011001011011101100001110101010101010101000011101 0101012..."
"OK, just remember this:
100101101100010100101010100011100101010010
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
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!
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?
See quote below:
l
"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.htm
the Pi-World-Ranking-List has the rules for participation and breaks down the ranking by world, continent, and country I'm just proud that, once again, an earthling holds the #1 spot. Good thing they let your search by world. Also, the martians are really slacking.
Not only that, but it is transcendental.
What's the resistance of a transcendental number?
Ohmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
Tag lost or not installed.
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.
:). 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?
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
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.
Memorize the sentence "how I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics". The digits of PI are the number of letters in each word. Of course, this may not help too much if you are into "Slashdot spelling"...
Pi memorizes YOU!
why aren't these guys using their brain for something important. my computer can calculate pi forever and much faster.
Anyone have an MP3 of the event?
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.
First of all, he's 59 years old.
/pedantry
Second, you can call a little boy "mister" or preferably, "master."
Third, calling someone "SoAndSo-san" while you're otherwise speaking English sounds really stupid to people who actually speak Japanese.
Finally, you wouldn't use san for a little boy either. You'd call him kun or possibly , chan.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
IT'S THE BASE OF THE NATURAL LOGARITHM. LN(E) = 1.0
SHEESH, WHAT DO THEY TEACH IN SCHOOLS THESE DAYS.
From Mathworld at Wolfram Apparently Pi shows up in the bible twice. Weird.
Also, wikipedia has a rather complete coverage of the topic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I took the time to memorize pi to over 100,000 digits in base PI. When's that competition?
finish the fucking story, man.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
How do you memorize a number that deep
You only have to remember about 40 numbers and then they start repeating.