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Nicholas Sze of Yahoo Finds Two-Quadrillionth Digit of Pi
gregg writes "A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi — and a few digits either side of it. Nicholas Sze, of technology firm Yahoo, determined that the digit — when expressed in binary — is 0."
Apparently, 100%. :D
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
does this bit from TFA strike anyone else as a bit odd?
"The computation took 23 days on 1,000 of Yahoo's computers, racking up the equivalent of more than 500 years of a single computer's efforts."
So.... 1000 machines, 23 days, assuming embarrassingly parallel that's 23000 days of computation on 1 machine.
23000/365 = 63.0136986 years
now each of those could have 8 cores and they meant 500 years on a single core processor of course.
but still odd phrasing.
And, we know this is correct how ?
Really? You "could care less"? So... that means that you actually do care, right? I mean, since you just said it is possible for you to care less than you do. I'm just sayin'... Just for your edification, the proper way to say what you are trying to say is, "I could not care less." And with regard to the subject at hand in this thread, the idea that someone's poor English skills could have any bearing whatsoever on his or her skills at mathematics is just laughable and shows how little anyone presuming such preposterously arrogant nonsense actually knows about mathematics or the history of the brilliant minds in non-English-speaking cultures who have contributed to it. In other words, total bullshit.
It is 1 in binary.
That quote really doesn't work. If that digit, expressed in binary, is 0 then the (decimal) digit is also 0. /. summaries would at least get that right. (Yeah, I'm new here.)
But that cannot be what they meant, so I think they meant that the nth binary digit is 0, in which case the title should have been something like "Nicholas Sze of Yahoo finds two quadrillionth binary digit of pi".
You'd think that
In any case, this is the interesting bit of the article:
"Interestingly, by some algebraic manipulations, (our) formula can compute pi with some bits skipped; in other words, it allows computing specific bits of pi," Mr Sze explained to BBC News.
The rest is pretty much filler and brand tossing.
the digit — when expressed in binary — is 0.
Jeez, what are the odds of that?
1 in 10
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You're forgetting all the zombie networks that connect to Yahoo. There's probably a few billion nodes there, and there's not a friggin' chance Yahoo will admit to knowing about them.
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)
I can calculate it completely in base pi: 10.0 done. What's all the fuss about? You just need to be smarter when picking your bases and you can avoid all this trouble.
Pi has the property that all binary strings of a given length occur with equal frequency, making it an excellent source of fair pseudorandom bits. There are plenty of applications in which 2 quadrillion pseudorandom bits is grossly insufficient.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Actually not for that reason. Proof by counterexample: A non-terminating, non-repeating number could be expressed in a decimal expansion consisting only of 1s and 0s. Just take the binary expression for Pi, and consider it a decimal (it now represents a different number). Since Pi is a non-repeating, non-terminating expansion in binary, the binary expression is again non-repeating, nont-terminating as a decimal. It will never contain the number 2, or any possible combination containing 2. There's a lot more subtlety in Pi than people realize.