Pi Computed To 10 Trillion Digits

An anonymous reader writes "A Japanese programmer that goes by the handle JA0HXV announced that he has computed Pi to 10 trillion digits. This breaks the previous world record of 5 trillion digits. Computation began in October of 2010 and finished yesterday after multiple hard disk problems, he said. Details in English are not fully available yet, but the Japanese page gives further details. JA0HXV has held computation records for Pi in the past."

Comments

Re:What Does This Mean?

[nacturation]

If you memorize up to the first zero in pi, you can navigate the circumference of the universe in a perfect circle and when you get to the end of the circle (based on the digits of pi you memorized) you'll be off by less than the width of a human hair.

Re:What Does This Mean?

[fatphil]

It's not useless for those interested in computational efficiency with huge datasets. (Things like weather modelling, climate modelling, nuke aging analysis, fusion research, etc.)

If you look at a naive theoretical model for a computer, then you would predict that certain classes of algorithms would be most efficient for calculating digits of pi. (These algorithms use huge FFTs in order to do bignum arithmetic.) Several world records were broken using this technique. However, as the problem size grew, the FFTs started to become impractical, as the communication overhead started to dominate, and eventually algorithms that didn't have such a communication overhead became favoured. Better models of computational efficiency were arrived at, and new records were broken. We now understand time/space trade-offs better.

However, your loaf of bread won't be cheaper because of this, nor will the number of homeless on the street decrease.