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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."
Well, the 243,000,500,000,000,000,002th digit of pi is "4".
Go on, prove me wrong.
*facepalm* So that's 9 in decimal, right?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Good to know they're putting those idle datacenters to good use. It's not like Yahoo has any real users anymore to generate load.
"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.
So why don't they just use their formula to compute the last digit of Pi already?
That would be the rational approach. Who cares about the two quadrillionth digit??
Geez, even I could have gotten it right half the time.
Word. This discovery is useless. Now, if he'd managed to prove that the digit, when expressed in binary, is 2... That'd be something to shout about!
the digit — when expressed in binary — is 0.
Jeez, what are the odds of that?
We only know how to calculate it in binary (or any base that is a power of 2). You can't convert to decimal without know all the rest of the digits.
Parent is correct, digits of pi can be calculated independently in base 2, 4, 8, 16 or 2^n since the 1990s. So, it is possible to calculate the 2,000,000,000,000,000th number of pi without calculating the digits before that one. Now, if we want to calculate the digit in decimal (or converse the binary digit to decimal), we need to calculate all of the two-quadrillion digits. Knowing this digit is in itself not very interesting.
Amazing, so is Yahoo's profit projections within five years!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
And before answering, the computer paused and said, "You're not going to like it ..."