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5 Trillion Digits of Pi — a New World Record
KPexEA writes "Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo claim to have calculated the number pi to 5 trillion places, on a single desktop and in record time. The main computation took 90 days on Shigeru Kondo's desktop. Verification was done using two separate computers. The program that was used for the main computation is y-cruncher v0.5.4.9138 Alpha." Looks like the chart of computer-era approximations of Pi here might need an update.
If there's ever a robot uprising, I bet it's going to be started by us making them do stuff like this.
Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
You know the KGB commercials? I'd find it funny if someone were to ask them what the 5 trillionth and one decimal digit of Pi is.
I've heard that in the book (not movie) "Contact" that when Jodie Foster's character meets the uber-aliens she asks them:
"Do you believe in God?"
-"Yes"
Taken aback "Really, why?"
-"We have proof, when PI is expended out to (some number), there is a message"...
I really wish I read the book to know what the message is (maybe "Nietsche is dead"?)
I no longer login because I feel that while attacking a company's products is fair game (specifically Apple), having stories singling out their users as "selfish" and unkind is not "news for nerds stuff that matters". Am I an Apple fanboi? Let's just say I've used NIX for decades (yes I'm old) and I'm not talking OS X.
A tour de force of math and computing hardware and software skills.
Makes me want to turn in my geek card.
Looks like the chart of computer-era approximations of Pi here might need an update.
This chart is very outdated anyway.
It doesn't even list Daisuke Takahashi (2009, 2.576.980.370.000 digits), and Fabrice Bellard (2010, 2.699.999.990.000 digits)
They just took the number 3.14159 and added a load of random digits to the end - let's face it, nobody's going to check!
How can we be sure all those digits are correct?
And, more important question, what are they for?
In all cases I faced so far, 355/113 provides a simple and nice approximation.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
... how many digits someone will calculate Pi too each year.
Which has the better carbon footprint? Calculating pi out to the wazoo for 72 days, or baking an actual pie in a stove?
Why?
door sign
gasman
But I am legitimately curious what is the real significance of learning Pi to a more accurate measurement? I'm not a mathematician, physicist, or computer scientist.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Trillion in which language? How many zeros does it have?
But don't we have algorithms which let us calculate pi to an arbitrary number of digits? Well-known series methods computed using algorithms which have been tuned and re-tuned to the point where it's not really possible to make further major computational optimizations? Therefore this isn't so much a new accomplishment as it is "hey look, I left my pi calculating program running longer than the last guy" modified by the occasional minor optimization tweak and running on faster hardware?
Okay, great, you now have a new more precise fixed value for pi. This means you can calculate things involving pi to precision even most physicists can't find a use for. I'm sure that's nice. Someone somewhere maybe has a use for it. Maybe this made that person's day. But is it really, really something that's newsworthy? And if hypothetical "needing pi to 5 trillion digits" guy needed it to that precision that badly - wouldn't he have already let the calculation run long enough to get it already if this particular calculation only took 90 days?
I wonder how much faster it would go if they had used *NIX instead of Windows.
They're calculating Pi in base 10, which is the wrong path.
Pi should be calculated in base 3.141593...
It's a paradox, people.
In most cases you dont need more than 20 digits, doing more than that is a waste of computing power. Who the hell is going to use 5 bloody trillion digits of pi ? there is practical use for it... That said if it made Mr Kondo happy and it is the sort of things he enjoys doing I can only encourage him and congratulate him. After all in words of some great philosopher "it matters not how insignificant what you are doing seems, and it is important that you still do it"
I've tried to write simple test programs to calculate PI up to some number of decimal places, but found that for each iteration of the calcuation, you end up having to track divisions that give results which are often recurring (example 0.333333333). These numbers end up having to be added to results from previous iterations and then you have all sorts of rounding problems, like where 0.3333... + 0.33333.... + 0.33333 doesn't add up to 1 and so on. Is there some kind of documentation available that advises on how to deal with basic arithmetic on (potentially infinitely recurring) floating point numbers?
Little help! I've fallen under the weight of 5 trillions pencil lead digits and I can't get up.
Speaking of 5 trillions. What is that exactly?
5x10^12 or who?
write it on the back of a Mazda 3?
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
When I read the title, I thought someone had successfully memorized 5 trillion digits of Pi. They just computed it? What a letdown.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Yes, we do. Mathematical algorithms, i.e., equations on paper.
Absolutely not. The algorithms have to run on practical, exists-on-the-Earth-today computers. Try to multiply two, million-digit numbers together on your laptop and you'll see what I mean. These achievements are all about computational optimizations. RTFA -- especially the sections entitled "Arithmetic Algorithms" and "Maximizing Scalability." Even the algorithm used for multiplication changes (dynamically!) during the program's execution, based on the size of the operands.
Not even close. The computations are so long, and so intense, that errors caused by hardware imperfections can be expected, so error detection and correction algorithms have to be added. If "I left my pi calculating program running longer than the last guy" it would not produce the correct result -- even if the data structures and algorithms it used were up to the task.
In a word, yes. Could you do it? It's a very, very difficult technical feat, one that required hardware powers and software abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Besides, you're worried about newsworthiness when the two previous /. articles are on wall-climbing robots and the popularity of video game arcades in New York?
This isn't about needing pi to 5 trillion digits. This is about learning how to do large computations faster. Like, improving the state of the art.
That's A LOTTA Pieces of PI! SORRY
what's the last digit of Pi
Eugenijus
..isn't it a wonderful time to be alive?
5 trillion digits are a *lot* of digits! no patterns yet in there?
Just to be sure, have the sent the digits to the SETI program looking for patterns? There is some talk that beyond some 2 or 3 billion digits there is a message that apparently begins, "O Brhama, I have created Thee to build the universe, You shall create the universe in accordance to these Laws called Vedas...."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hmm, I'm not I like this. Has anybody considered the security impact of this? Pi being a proper irrational number is bound to have, as substrings of digits in it's decimal representation, all possible combinations of characters represented as eg. UTF-8, so somebody could easily find all passwords currently in use in there, lined up alphabetically. Somebody clearly hasn't thought this through.
Yeah, it's not March 14th but for the occasion it seems fitting:
It's a Wonderful Day for Pi
Pi - full version / just the numbers
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
So, is it still between 3.14 and 3.15?
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
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Dont you think trying to do something like this is quite... Irrational?
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All this talk of pi is making me hungry....
... a desktop computer? That's not a desktop computer. No one should call it desktop, even if it's in a $40 worth case.
That's thousands of dollars worth hardware.
But, my teacher said Pi is 22/7. Surely that's close enough.
While this is cool. It reminded me of this guy, who was able to memorize pi out to 22000 digits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet
You set someone up there with a perfect Pink Floyd joke, but I can't find the best algorithm...
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
How is this stuff that matters? You'll get 10 trillion if the computer runs long enough. It's inevitable. This is about as newsworthy as second dot kernel releases.
Direct link to the hardware (with photos)!
Also, anyone else also notice the partially cropped off friend, it's not Clippy, on the final result screenshot?
How big was this desk, and what was sitting on its top that was doing the actual calculation? It's odd to simply refer to a piece of furniture as doing the calculation.
And this is totally meaningless Consider the actual definition of pi the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter; Can any circle actually be measured this exactly?
No, all this is an exercise of numerical algorithm used to calculate pi.
The "world's fastest laser printer" prints about 60 ppm. At one page a second, 10,000 digits per page, it would take 500 million seconds or fifteen years to print it out. So one might hope to live to see all the known digits of pi printed out... unless those pesky computer scientists calculate more of them. But, really, 5 trillion digits ought to be enough for anybody.
And it would only require a million reams of paper.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
the PDF correctly displays the mathematical formula, while the html doesn't for me
Yes, the HTML version appears to be encoded in the old Macintosh character set, and doesn't have a header specifying the encoding. To view it properly, change the encoding in your browser. In Firefox: View -> Character Encoding -> More Encodings -> West European -> Western (MacRoman).
Alternatively, you can save it locally and convert it to UTF-8. If you have iconv, the command would be
iconv -f MAC -t UTF8 -o piCompute-utf8.html piCompute.html
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Memory $6,708.00
MB $359.00
Disks $3,599.84
Disk controllers $1,058.00
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Case/Misc $500.00
Total $16,330.14
Insert obligatory Star Trek: TOS reference here.
You set someone up there with a perfect Pink Floyd joke, but I can't find the best algorithm...
Another Glitch in the Call
(sung to Pink Floyd's The Wall)
We don't need no indirection
We don't need no flow control
No data typing or declarations
Did you leave those list alone?
Hey! Hacker! Leave those lists alone!
All in all, it's just a pure lisp function call.
Cranking out 5 TRILLION places in Pi is. . , well, it's pretty staggering.
But is anybody else planning to run some explorations through all that data? I expect somebody, somewhere is.
Here's a fun experiment. . .
Draw a picture of Batman on your Wacom, reduce it using some graphics algorithm to the shortest string of digits you possibly can, and search for that string in Pi. He's got to be in there somewhere. . . Probably there's a set of plans for, "How to build an awesome time machine", too.
-FL
Tin ear. Poetry fail. The last line needs more syllables.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Once you get past 2 quadrillion places...PI starts spitting out alphanumeric...the first occurrence is ...42531whogivesaflyingflapdoodle...
So erm...what is the 5th trillionth digit of pi? Not to cast aspersions on such a brilliant piece of work...just curious (I for one, would like to know something Alex Trebek doesn't know).
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Anyone else notice what seems to be the legs of a skirt-clad girl at the top of the screenshot in the article? The researchers must have been awfully lonely those 90 days.
They say there's an algorithm for determining the nth digit of pi. So why don't we have a big distributed network of volunteer computers keep calculating new digits of pi, and verifying answers against each other? Has this been attempted before for pi calculation?
^ = Spam account please delete!
Also got my first story posted! Yippee!
Well I calculated more digits of PI with my nvidia cuda program in 20 seconds. So take that!
I think the Pink Floyd adaptation would involve "Pi has become... comfortably numb"
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Surely there should be, by now, a server out there somewhere continuously calculating and serving up additional digits of pi? The Web site art is obvious, of course.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
5 trillion + 1
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
A year has "exactly" 1e7 * sqr(PI) seconds :P
I can't explain, you would not understand. This is not how I am.
mod me funny