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Google Smashes the World Record For Calculating Digits of Pi (wired.co.uk)
Pi just got bigger. Google's Compute Engine has calculated the most digits of pi ever, setting a new world record. From a report: Emma Haruka Iwao, who works in high performance computing and programming language communities at Google, used infrastructure powered by Google Cloud to calculate 31.4 trillion digits of pi. The previous world record was set by Peter Trueb in 2016, who calculated the digits of pi to 22.4 trillion digits. This is the first time that a publicly available cloud software has been used for a pi calculation of this magnitude.
Iwao became fascinated by pi when she learned about it in math class at school. At university, one of her professors, Daisuke Takahashi, was the record holder for the most-calculated digits of pi using a supercomputer. Now, y-cruncher is the software of choice for pi enthusiasts. Created in 2009, y-cruncher is designed to compute mathematical constants like pi to trillions of digits. "You need a pretty big computer to break the world record," says Iwao. "But you can't just do this with a computer from a hardware store, so people have previously built custom machines." In September of 2018, Iwao started to consider how the process of calculating even more digits of pi would work technically. Something which came up quickly was the amount of data that would be necessary to carry out the calculations, and store them -- 170 terabytes of data, which wouldn't be easily hosted by a piece of hardware. Rather than building a whole new machine Iwao used Google Cloud.
Iwao used 25 virtual machines to carry out those calculations. "But instead of clicking that virtual machine button 25 times, I automated it," she explains. "You can do it in a couple of minutes, but if you needed that many computers, it could take days just to get the next ones set up." Iwao ran y-cruncher on those 25 virtual machines, continuously, for 121 days.
Iwao became fascinated by pi when she learned about it in math class at school. At university, one of her professors, Daisuke Takahashi, was the record holder for the most-calculated digits of pi using a supercomputer. Now, y-cruncher is the software of choice for pi enthusiasts. Created in 2009, y-cruncher is designed to compute mathematical constants like pi to trillions of digits. "You need a pretty big computer to break the world record," says Iwao. "But you can't just do this with a computer from a hardware store, so people have previously built custom machines." In September of 2018, Iwao started to consider how the process of calculating even more digits of pi would work technically. Something which came up quickly was the amount of data that would be necessary to carry out the calculations, and store them -- 170 terabytes of data, which wouldn't be easily hosted by a piece of hardware. Rather than building a whole new machine Iwao used Google Cloud.
Iwao used 25 virtual machines to carry out those calculations. "But instead of clicking that virtual machine button 25 times, I automated it," she explains. "You can do it in a couple of minutes, but if you needed that many computers, it could take days just to get the next ones set up." Iwao ran y-cruncher on those 25 virtual machines, continuously, for 121 days.
... can I download it from?
All that time and energy wasted on showing off. Nerds are hilarious.
Sounds like Iwao smashed the record, but she happened to use Google Cloud computers to do it. With just 25 machines, Google staff probably was unaware of her existence.
Just in case somebody missed it, it's 3/14 today.
That's even more digits of Pi than I have calculated!
How can we make sure that the digits are even correct? What would prevent an algorithm to generate random numbers after some millions of valid digits?
So if her last digit was wrong, how far off would she be on a calculation of the diameter of the observable universe?
Does pi have any meaning when you get details beyond the Planck length?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"But you can't just do this with a computer from a hardware store...
I always get my computers from Home Depot.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
So the same piece of software, y-cruncher, was used to break the record 6 times.
This latest record has 31,415,926,535,897 digits. Har har, get it?
Pi just got bigger.
You missed a real opportunity there to say:
There's now a lot more PI to go around.
It's even more delicious than you think at first glance... "around", get it?!?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Google did nothing other than sell the environment. Maybe the headline should say Intel because it may have built the actual hardware, or Cisco because its switches were used somewhere?
Just sayin'
"But instead of clicking that virtual machine button 25 times, I automated it,"
She needs 170 terabytes of space across 25 computers for 121 days to produce 31.4 (Ha!) trillion digits. And she's worried about clicking a button a few times?? Hell, even I'm not that anal unless it was a trivial solution. (for a in `seq 1 25` ; do ./push ; done)
First world problems, I guess.
So in all seriousness, how do you check that? Run it again and see if it produces the same number? If there's a timing bug, it'll differ. If there's (say) a BAD timing bug, it won't; but might differ on a different machine. Or numeric coprocessor problems: One Two Three. Or cosmic rays actually flipping a bit somewhere. (ECC CPUs?) I realize this is all fun and games, but how do you know that it's actually correct? See if you can use it to successfully square the circle, in which case it's not?
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Can someone explain the difference in storage size required to do this? The article says they used 171TB to calculate out to 31T digits? Would the storage requirement just be slightly greater than the number of digits calculated? Maybe like 10% for the application and some overhead?
Public-key/private-key encryption systems are based on factoring primes and the premise is no one can identify all the primes in a truly huge list of whole numbers starting at zero.
So now that we know what Google can do in corporate spare time with its processors, maybe someone out there with more knowledge that I have can answer the question "Can two-factor encryption be undermined by the computing power Google used today to generate a Pi Day (March 14th) news release?"
In terms of electricity.
Or how much would it have cost someone who doesn't work at Google.
25 servers, 121 days, 170 terabytes of data.
And then the real question, was it really WORTH it?
BlameBillCosby.com
The way you check it is by using a spigot algorithm and checking every nth digit in the set.
Spigot algorithms do not require calculation of intervening digits, so you just pick the position and the algorithm coughs up the correct digit.
Here is the one I would pick...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93Plouffe_formula
Then just check every 10th or 20th or even 100th digit. If there are no discrepancies then you have a winner.
For verification the tool in question has two methods of calculating digits of Pi, and compares the results.
For automating 25 clicks, I would assume it was more than a single click but even so, what geek hasn't wasted more time automating something that it would have taken to do manually? Manual repetitive tasks are boring, automation is an interesting little task.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't think I can handle any more pie.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Alan Turing is busy programming a Colossus 1000, finishes, waits the the lightbulbs to flicker, and runs out excitedly straight into the Guiness Book of Records offices.
"I've done it! I've used a computer to calculate Pi! It's.... about 3. It's just one digit so far, but with a more powerful computer, we could get this down to two, or even three, decimal places!"
And that's how the world record was initially set.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If you change that digit, the universe will explode.
Seems irrational to me.
Way too much work. Just pass a law that sets pi to be 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/
This is the guy (Alaxander J. Yee) that wrote the software, and used it to compute ten trillion digits, on souped up PC hardware !
I was always interested in his PC hardware, see this link with some pictures from the 10 trillion digit effort.
http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs/pi-10t/details.html?level=1
Should've reported it as 3.14 x 10^13 digits.
How much would have Google charged the public to reproduce this?
How can we check a PI-number?
We can use this formula to check any Nth number and see if it matches
https://www.math.hmc.edu/funfacts/ffiles/20010.5.shtml
- Peder
Everything about that statement is wrong.
We don't factor primes, we factor prime products. Furthermore, it's relatively easy to identify primes, or we couldn't come up with the two large primes to multiply together in the first place.
We can also test that the product isn't prime with good efficiency.
What we can't do is efficiently identify which primes were multiplied together in the first place, not even knowing a priori that there are exactly two prime factors, and that they are roughly comparable in magnitude (with a similar number of digits—not that this hint helps much at all).
(for a in `seq 1 25` ; do ./push ; done)
You just saved yourself 25 keystrokes...in a mere 38 keystrokes.
I saw a documentary where the aliens were sending messages to civilizations by encoding message from the 1 trillionth digit of pi.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Was it really a woman that did it?
That's kind of like saying a woman won the decathalon because Caitlyn Jenner did it.
Hey boss. I want to harness a couple hundred VMs to find the most profitable stock market buy-sell strategy based on all the different types of moving averages and periods. I figure six moths to a year to write the code, then another 6 mo at least to let it chunk along. I'll share the results with you before I publish.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Now let's do exp(1).
My initial reaction to this story was to wonder how irrelevant this is from a real world perspective. The actual universe is not flat. Made me wonder how many decimal places actually apply to reality. I'm guessing that it's a larger number somewhere out between galaxies... Here on earth, probably less than 10 digits of pi are significant, and fewer than that if you were on Mercury.
Seems to make more sense to calculate an irrational number that has some rational relationship to the real world. How about e? I guess that means February 7th should be e day?
Recently I was actually doing some thinking about pi, but it was purely a coincidence and I just used pi because the digits were conveniently available. Eventually led to https://oeis.org/A036903 which begins 32, 606, 8555, 99849, 1369564, 14118312, 166100506, 1816743912, 22445207406, 241641121048, 2512258603207...
What I was actually looking for was a characterization of the randomness of an irrational number, pi in this case. There is a formula that predicts the values of A036903. (It is (10^n)*(ln(10^n)) for n-digit sequences. Or is it for (n-1)-digit sequences? I'd have to check my notes... (Guess why I switched from math to computer science.)) There was also a diversion into binary representations and the corresponding sequences and formula (though the binary version of A036903 is apparently not in the OEIS).
Not meaningful, but I found it curious that for pi 7 of the 8 decimal predictions were low, while 5 of the 10 binary predictions were low and 5 were high. At least I can't imagine what meaning those results might have.
After some thought, I would now reword the question as "What are the characteristics of irrational numbers that come closest to (or farthest from) the predicted values?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I 'm Joe Branya, the original poster. Epine is correct. I wrote in haste and it shows.
But Epine spotted the issue I was addressing when he/she said "What we can't do is efficiently identify which primes were multiplied together in the first place".
With enough memory to store the universe of primes and an index of the two right-hand digits that result when each potential pair of primes are multiplied together, a brute force cracking seems possible. I don't know if the Google setup is large enough to create and store the required information but if it is then Epines very legitimate caveat about efficiency may not matter.
Sorry for my sloppy writing over my first coffee.
Joe B..
Just out of curiosity... has anybody checked their result?
Can't be, because some universal constants are irrational, and therefore cannot be in another number.
imagine the following number: 0.131415926...
which is
0.1 followed by the digits of pi in base 10.
this is clearly irrational, (since pi is irrational, it will be neverending), yet it's a irrational number that contains another number in them.
Why isn't your favourite irrational number like this? Can you prove that pi is not contained within even e?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
How much better is the world now? How many people are better off? How many animals are saved? No "pi" for them, eh?
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Now the Shepherd's Pi song can be extended from one million hours (derived from one billion Pi digits) to 30 billion hours, or 3.5 million years!
Elevator music for geological ages!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
25 virtual machines spent 121 days not analysing protein folding or cures for cancer.
I'd like to know the first pi x 10 trillion digits!
If they left the machines on for 5 years they would have more digits.
While having more detail into the nature of pi is definitely cool, a contest of who can leave the most expensive computer running longest is not really that cool.