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Pi Recited to 100,000 Digits
DiAmOnDirc writes "Akira Haraguchi, 60, needed more than 16 hours to recite the number to 100,000 decimal places, breaking his personal best of 83,431 digits set in 1995, his office said Wednesday. He made the attempt at a public hall in Kisarazu, just east of Tokyo. Haraguchi, a psychiatric counselor and business consultant in nearby Mobara city, took a break of about 5 minutes every one to two hours, going to the rest room and eating rice balls during the attempt, said Naoki Fujii, spokesman of Haraguchi's office. Fujii said all of Haraguchi's activities during the attempt, including his bathroom breaks, were videotaped for evidence that will later be sent for verification by the Guinness Book of Records."
More to the point (although you could infer it from the "newsworthiness" of the story): he did it from memory. Although I'd be surprised if anyone had ever even read out 100,000 digits of Pi but, then again, I've been surprised by stupid people. Also from the article, "In 2002, University of Tokyo mathematicians, aided by a supercomputer, set the world record for figuring out pi to 1.24 trillion decimal places." So:
a) He's got a way to go; and
b) Sagan not proven right yet, still no circle.
I'm guessing there's no girlfriend, either, but the only evidence I have supporting this is that, well, this guy memorized 100,000 digits of Pi. C'mon...
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
At least he didn't talk with his mouth full...
He who questions training, only trains himself at asking questions. -- The Sphinx, Mystery Men
is "Transcendental Meditation".
He's so White & Nerdy.
(Asians are White)
Memorizing the digits of e is cool.
Weird Al's got nothing on this dude.
sulli
RTFJ.
I put this kind of thing in the same category as so-called "competitive eating". Yeah, it's impressive on some small level I guess, but what is the point? What drives somebody to do such a thing?
I wonder how long it will be until Mr. Haraguchi breaks a trillion. He has already obviously wasted, err... dedicated so much of his life to memorizing the first 100k places. Isn't 3.14 a good enough approximation. Or if you are feeling really lazy pi~=3.
All that work and he could have just asked Weird Al.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xEzGIuY7kw
22/7. Not pi, but an incredible simulation... for a fraction, at least.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
With english/french/spanish 5.1 and DTS and will be released when Mr. Haraguchi finishes the commentary track.
Well I don't know about you, but I sure wouldn't appreciate a film crew in the restroom taping ME while I was taking a dump. Not that I suppose anybody would want to watch it anyway... but STILL!
... going to the rest room and eating rice balls during the attempt
I wonder how many digits of pi can be squeezed onto a piece of rice.
100,000 decimal places? That's only 100kb, it could even be written on a 5.25 floppy if I still had one. A guy able to recite all of the latest kernel sources, THAT would be impressive.
He's not memorizing like a regular person would.
It's been talked about on slashdot before using some memorization technique association groups of numbers with memorable patterns.
Don't ask me for links.
How the HELL does someone do that?!
(Hopefully this will incite meaningful discussion.)
...must really whiz by at his place.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Al only knows it to a thousand places.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Anyone able to do that probably needs a psychiatric counselor themselves!
Akira Haraguchi [...] a psychiatric counselor
So I guess being able to recite pi to the 100,000 digit is just further evidence that he's crazy.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
So how many decimal places of pi does one see in a bowl of pee? Inquiring minds want to know...
...except it's not a really useful skill any more. Of course, in the earliest days of humanity when you passed down things orally it was vital, and even after we learned to write you still needed a human to have "the big picture". Indexes and search engines and hyperlinks have made that almost redundant too. Memorization today is trivia, and my computer is a helluva lot better at it than me. It could easily store all the trivia of LoC and Wikipedia combined. Unless I can get an understanding out of it, which of course requires knowing the subject matter, I don't see the point. Memorization is for me means to an end, if you don't seek an understanding of it why bother with it at all?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It'll probably come out sounding patronizing, but I've got to say, I'm glad it was a 60-year-old who managed this. Our culture today is far too youth-centric-- hurray for older people proving they're capable of competing with and even outperforming the whippersnappers at feats of freakish, useless intellectual wankery.
The babes!!!
wait a minute....
And I still can't even remember some of my own phone numbers!
This is actually circular meditation.
It started of Ace of Spades, then two of Spades, then three of Spades... ...then Queen of Hearts, and finally King of Hearts.
Reciting some reverse engineered DRM, or other encryption code would be a useful demonstration.
because the DMCA does not trump freedom of expression.
But perhaps such a performance should be ouside of the US, just in case.
I'm sure we can all remember the first digit: 3, right?
:)
But it's all those digits (decimal places) that follows the 3 that we all have trouble remembering, right?
So okay. Just memorize the following simple phrase:
"I wish I could recollect pi easily today"
The number of letters in each word are the first 8 decimal digits:
1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5
Thus PI is approximately: 3.14159265...
Which should be <i>plenty</i> long enough for most calculations.
The only hard part of course is remembering to use the word "recollect" instead of "remember".
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
I was just thinking tonight about how my memory of Pi is dwindling away over time.. I used to remember over 100 digits, now..
5 105 is about all I can manage..
:P
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939938
At this rate I'll be at 3.1 by the time I turn 60
Will program for karma.
...I'm currently at 1,135,972 digits for 1/3. Also, I already finished reciting all the digits for 1/2.
The bottleneck is the interface between the computer and your brain. Now, as soon as we get computers to think for us this won't be a problem (because then people will only be necessary until the computers perfect robotics), but until then, we're going to need people who can randomly access large data sets and are adept at interpreting and analyzing the data. We call these people experts, and they are vital to the existence of society.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
Things Akira Haraguchi would say if he were a Slashdotter:
All your first 100,000 digits are belong to me.
Only 60-year-old neighbors of North Korea need precision.
In Soviet Russia, transcendental numbers recite YOU.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
that slashdotters were weird!
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by. (Robert Frost, 1916)
"...385 105 is about all I can manage.."
..375 105?
you mean
I can't even count to 100,000!
I saw this linked above by an AC. http://www.asahi.com/national/update/1004/TKY20061 0040185.html Its an article in the Asahi Shinbun about the feat. My brief non-literal translation follows (if its inaccurate, sorry in advance, for accurate translations you can pay me my hourly):
"Using equivilence rules like 3 = sa [n.b. all numbers in Japanese have a variety of syllables which they can be read as -- thus, you can remember a phone number as roughly a two to three word phrase, like my bank being 555-GOT-MONEY], you can memorize the first N of the infinite digits of pi by constructing a story of sufficient length and memorizing that. His previous record was seven years ago.
After reciting the 100k digits they were checked against a computer printout. Mr. Haraguchi then retired with his family. They brought him his favorite beer, which he proceeded to chug. He commented 'Its good that I was able to relax'*"
* This is ambiguous in Japanese: my guess is he is referring to his ability to have been relaxed while reciting the digits, but eh, doesn't really matter either way.
By the way: my back of the envelope math suggests 100k digits of pi would leave you with a Japanese text about a tenth as long as the Bible, give or take. So its neither impossible nor a mean feat to have memorized a text of that length.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
In a special called Brainman on the Discovery Science channel, a camera crew followed around a savant named Daniel Tammet. He was "only" able to count to about 22,514 decimal places in about 5 hours. For Akira Haraguchi it is a case of memorization, but for Daniel Tammet the digits somehow appear in his mind. I think Daniel was also able to tell if a number was prime or not. I'm not positive about this, but IIRC some scientists at Stanford university quizzed him using a known way to tell if someone is either calculating the digits in their head or if it is just based off memorization. Of course he passed the test. Since there are probably inaccuracies in my comment, I would suggest checking out Brainman on Discovery sometime.. it is a great special.
He made the attempt at a public hall in Kisarazu
Did people actually go to watch this guy? What did they say to each other when he finished?
"Hey, remember the part when he was all like 3, 5, 1, 7, 4, 4, 2, 5, 6, 6, 2, 1, 0, 4, 5, 7? That was wicked sick"
"Yea, yea, and then he followed it up with a 4, 2, 4, 7, 3, 1, 1, 5, 2, 2, 5, 9, 0, 2, 3 and I was like ROCK ON Akira, ROCK ON"
I've heard people say that psychiatrists are a little bit crazy themselves.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
pssht, honestly, we all know what really happend... he said the first one hundred digits, everyone fell alsleep, then he randomly said 99,900 numbers... and no one was rude enough to say "oh, can you do that again please, i missed it"
*thinking of decent signature*
And I thought I was cool for reciting e to 50 decimal places in calculus class last year. ownt ;\
Must be a slow day at Slashdot.
Anyone have any idea how this is possible?
Are regular people capable of memorizing a sequence like that?
I can't even remember what kind of pie i had for dessert last weekend. Da Dum, DING! I can't even remember why the hell I started reading this stupid Slashdot rag. haha!
Why stick up for big business?
is to videotaped while he's on the toilet seat eating rice balls and trying to remember the 130000th digit of pi. It's the shebang of all bad moments.
Actually, just being this person must be terrible. Our minds have so many things in them..trolls, flames, C++, pedantic logic, Prison Break, Dubya, pr0n.. this guy has one thing and one thing only in his head: Pi. He's reached, like, the limit of neurological "permanent" storage.
If he remembers to bruth his teeth at night, he automatically looses a couple hundred digits. If he realises he likes rice balls, it's 50 digits down the drain. Imagine living like that, a life where every thought can possibly disrupt your memory, destroying years of your life's efforts. Your brain geography is covered in PI. You wake up: PI. Work desk: PI. Local pub: PI. Bed-time: PI.
I think I'm going to write a song about how dying in prison and going to hell is better than PI.
That's hysterical!
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
in the video, it only goes up to 700 places.
um dang, cant remember
me think tis a 3.14 somthing
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
(technically 1 is the 4th digit, but not in the context they're giving).
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
This reminds me of Daniel Tammet the autistic man whom recited over 22,000 numbers in Pi. He also learned Icelandic in a week as part of a documentary he was the subject of. I wonder if he'll try to do more than 100,000 now that he has more motivation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet
Do you know the history of psychiatry?
Bruce
Just how perfect of a circle does one really need? Whats the point of all this rogue "memorization"? I'm sure my calculator was dually impressed, even though it never suffered from any accuracy problems in the past.
Er you're not supposed to do the counting in base 10...
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
I didn't see anywhere where it said he recited from memory. Did he just have a computer telling him what number to say next? If so then wtf? That's just someone with too much time on their hands.
This is actually pretty impressive when you look at the Pi World Ranking list.
. html/
Yes... there is actually a Pi World Ranking List!
http://pi-world-ranking-list.com/lists/memo/index
Wonder if the cameras covered his masturbating breaks too...
Nuff said.
100.000 digits? Not bad, but not as impressive as his countryman Takeru Kobayashi who set another world record by eating 53 and 3/4 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes.
Because his circles will always be rounder than mine.
Task Mangler
Since when do we do things because they're useful? It's just a cool fact, and that's sort of what /. is all about.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
i can recite the value for SQRT(-1)!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
All my best thinking gets done on the can too.
And what does it mean breaking his personal best of 83,431 digits set in 1995? Clearly he had no problem stopping at an odd number then, or did he think he knew the digits and just made a mistake? It implies that he made the leap from 83,431 to 100,000 without practice -- or does that statement mean he didn't vocalize the numbers?
Anyhow, this is all academic. I think I remember Bubba reciting 100,000 ways to fix shrimp, in the movie Forrest Gump - now that's something you can sink your teeth into!
Mmmm pi...
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
...I can't imagine memorizing 100,000 ANYTHING. Most people know about 25,000 words, 1,000 or so people, etc. - there is a certain amazement at what the human mind is capable of. Can you imagine if he memorized 100,000 faces and names? 100,000 cities and populations? It is astonishing how much information we can learn...
OK, so you really meant 355/113. The value of that fraction is actually accurate to 7 digits, which is 1 digit more than how it is expressed in whole fraction form. But if you look further, you can find a fraction that has an accuracy that is 3 digits more than the total number of digits in the fraction. That fraction is (with digits chopped so it doesn't get mangled in Slashdot HTML):
1901870728 5669230760 9014394471 4770339621 5907683135 4633719252 6115562704 3396809635 6432000780 8107929370 2997523451 8768883574 1387003036 8533612856 7115805986 7702399073 2279944269 0522019469 9766118756 0590556190 3648850292 8002591
... divided by ...
6053842551 4642032610 2361023215 9405317163 9147815034 5020739231 2531721347 4068823247 6946000058 7137745497 9656144746 8267746412 8740227175 4410094658 7144148739 6268034351 3347328160 6663121381 1257617460 3015134435 3855924025 288111
That's 217 numerator digits and 216 denominator digits for a total of 433 digits that gives PI to 436 digits. It doesn't get any better until a fraction with 14593 digits in both numerator and denominator for a total of 29186 digits that gives PI to an accuracy of 29190 digits, 4 more digits than in the fraction.
But 355/113 is easier to remember and 355/133 is apparently easier to type :-)
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
... "3.141 should be enough accuracy for anybody"
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I thought pi was three?
Have you read my journal today?
this guy needs to get a life
His previous record was set last July.
He commented, "It's good that I was able to do it relaxed." (This is unambiguous.)
Sorry, I didn't credit the person above to mention goroawase. Anyway, there are many ways to pronounce the numbers in Japanese and many more can be assumed, so it's easy to just remember the story and recite it. Just for fun, I took a minute to do an example: 3.14159265358979323846 which could be pronounced "san hito yon ichi go kuu - futarou gomi, itsuya kyuushichi, kumi futami. hashi roku." which would translate literally as "3 people eat 4 strawberries - Futaro Gomi, Itsuya Kyuushichi, Kumi Futami (all legitimate Japanese personal names). There are 6 chopsticks."
Fujii said all of Haraguchi's activities during the attempt, including his bathroom breaks, were videotaped for evidence that will later be sent for verification by the Guinness Book of Records..."
...and Youtube.
Choice: Watching a 16 hour video of a guy reciting Pi or turning in my geek status.
Answer: Guess I'm no longer a geek
WHY?!?
Has humanity sunk so low that this gets listed as an achievement?
I mean, come on now. I'm a nerd, a geek, asocial...
BUT DAMMIT PEOPLE! Please stop proving the jocks right.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Most people are quite unaware of the potential that the human brain has for storing information.
Back when I was a good 'ol Fundamentalist Christian, I could recite the complete Gospel of John, Matthew, Galatians and a large part of Romans and I and II Corinthians. From the KJV, no less. About 3,500 verses in all.
The secret is really no secret - simply dedicated, rote repetition. Of course, it helps that the the Bible generally follows a narrative - which gives you some clue as to what should come next.
Now a fire-breathing atheist (when you have that much of the Bible stored in your associative memory, it doesn't take long before you come across a certain passage, and immediately think 'wait a minute - didn't book so-and-so, chapter xxx say something completely different?' Still, it really freaks out the Baptists, JWs and assorted cultists who come a-knocking. Good times.
do they have voice recognition software good enough to verify this? It would take LOTS of humans listening and checking on this to verify it for me, and I know I wouldn't trust my bank's phone voice recognition software to verify this for me.
...when he made a computer selfdestruct by asking it a question that's impossible to answer.
Someone must have told this guy: "imagine a perfectly spherical cow..."
This is not the sig you're looking for.
Did you type it from memory?
for example in schools in Alabama it's dead easy.0 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000-ad nausia
3.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
(okay I know it was an april fools, wasn't it?)
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
You only need 4 bits for a digit. Thats 50KB
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I better have the first eight digits memorized so I can remember one of my domains... http://3.14159265.net/
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Don't forget the famous poem Near a Raven, which is my favorite encoding 740 digits of pi.
I may be mistaken but some years ago I thought I found that PI was a recurring decimal- a kind of pattern appeared after a number of decimals or so...If this IS the case, then I guess there would be nothing that amazing about having memorized n number of digits.
N/T
So basically humans have about 98 kBytes worth of memory :P
just memorize this: http://zenwerx.com/pi.php and go for more.
It's just Crap.
I've memorized Pi exactly. It's just 10, but that's in base Pi of course.
I can recite whole numbers from 0 to 100,000. Maybe more. Does that impress you?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
If I am going to hear someone reciting Pi, better be Kate Bush. http://www.katebush.com/katebush_html/lyrics.html/ Pi, is the second song.
In Soviet Russia, pi memorizes you!
"...his bathroom breaks, were videotaped for evidence that will later be sent for verification by the Guinness Book of Records."
Wow, what the heck was he doing in the bathroom?
I know you're answering to an integer division comment.
However, if we're going to be promoting non-trivial equations, a better one would be the infinite series by Ramanujan from about a century ago.
1/pi = summation { [ sqrt(8) / 99^2 ] * [ (4k)! * (1103 + 26390*k) ] / [ (k!)^4 * 396^(4k) ] }
from k = 0 -> infinite
The results, compared to pi (the spaces denote where the result becomes inaccurate):
pi. = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795
k=0: 3.141592 7300133056603139961890343
k=1: 3.141592653589793 8779989058263151
k=3: 3.14159265358979323846264 90657118
With each increment of k, the accuracy improves by about 8 or 9 digits.
To get to the same accurracy of as your example of 436 digits, the summation would need an upper bound of k = 50, I think. Even though this is a more complicated equation, it's a lot easier to remember than a simple division using 433 digits.
Lastly, to get better results you'd only need to increase k. I think an accuracy of 29190 would require an upper bound of around k = 3400, with no need to remember a new set of 29186 digits.
This is not my sig.
Many Muslims who memorize the Koran do it without speaking Arabic (i.e. Indonesia, China, etc), so that would be similar to memorizing Pi - in neither case does it have an integrated structure to the person . Try memorizing half a page in a foreign language then try memorizing the same amount in Pi - I'd choose Pi.
I only made it to 161 places.
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
"Redundant", huh? Man, the mods are stupid today.
> Please explain to me how reciting a number to 100,000 digits is smart.
And this, boys and girls, is a prime example of the difference between Intelligence and Wisdom.
The answer is critical to my new random number generator.
I wonder if he could explain his ability/technique for memorizing the digits of PI, or if anyone has studied him. Maybe he has some intuitive insight into the number, that allows him to do this feat. It is incredible that he can memorize PI to this precision. I find it hard to comprehend that he could do this without some kind of strategy.
If there is a technique that could be explained, then perhaps it could be applied to the field of mathematics, or put into a computer algorithm.
I'm the odd man out in an even number of participants
furlongs per fortnight in inches per minute (A little less than a couple of feet per hour).
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
AC
In a similar vein is The Afromen (Because we're too white): http://www.sequentialpictures.com/movieafromen.htm l
Most people know about 25,000 words
That might be true for people who only speak english, but not true for most other languages. And you also have to consider people whose native tongue is a language that requires them to memorize hundreds of thousands of words, and then they learn english on top of that. And there are still many people who speak more than 5 or 6 languages.
My point is, most people know way more than 25k words.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS