Slashdot Mirror


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.

7 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Are they exact? by VincenzoRomano · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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]
    1. Re:Are they exact? by grumbel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Knowing that the algorithm is correct and the implementation was codec correctly doesn't help you when you have faulty RAM that flips a bit.

  2. Re:KGB it! by sigmoid_balance · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually there is an algorithm to compute the n-th digit of Pi without computing the rest.

  3. Trillion? by Lord+Lode · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Trillion in which language? How many zeros does it have?

  4. Re:Mathematical Masturbation by MichaelSmith · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There might actually be something interesting in there. Lots of discoveries have been made by people who were just trying things out or seeing what they could see.

  5. Re:Update... by unixcrab · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They stopped updating it when it was very convincingly proven in the bible that pi is exactly equal to 3.

  6. Re:Mind-numbing computational outsourcing by Anne_Nonymous · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The same way the robots know they've finished calculating Pi.