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.

Comments

Re:Are they exact?

[VincenzoRomano]

a) you can calculate those with a different algorithm

How can you be sure it is correct?

b) we know an algorithm to directly calculate the nth binary digit of pi

We need to check all the billions digits there. Decimal digits.

c) it provides a good testbed for research on number crunching : the advance in calculations are due to algorithmic improvments that can be reused for other problems

I would use all that computing power for something more straightforwardly usefult, like protein folding into cancer research, for example.

Anyway, what part of the "research" concept don't you understand ?

The achieved goal.

plus 4, )Troll)

[Anonymous Coward]

thaN th1s BSD box,