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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.
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!
Reminds me of the MAX light rail station in the zoo tunnel in Portland, Oregon. Apparently there is the first 100 (1000?) digits of pi chiseled into one of the walls. A writer noticed that the first digits were correct, but quickly went astray. But later in the sequence, there was a recognizable early string of digits. The writer sleuthed that the sculptor had used the Book of Pi, which has the numbers in blocks of ten digits in five (or so) columns. In the book, you read the first row and then the next row.* The sculptor had read the first column, then the next column...
* or the other way around
Their they're doing there hair.
The moment we know, the stars will start to fade out.