5 Trillion Digits of Pi — a New World Record 299
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.
Are they exact? (Score:1, Insightful)
And, more important question, what are they for?
In all cases I faced so far, 355/113 provides a simple and nice approximation.
Re:KGB it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Trillion? (Score:3, Insightful)
Trillion in which language? How many zeros does it have?
Re:Mathematical Masturbation (Score:3, Insightful)
There might actually be something interesting in there. Lots of discoveries have been made by people who were just trying things out or seeing what they could see.
Re:Are they exact? (Score:5, Insightful)
Knowing that the algorithm is correct and the implementation was codec correctly doesn't help you when you have faulty RAM that flips a bit.
Re:Update... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mind-numbing computational outsourcing (Score:2, Insightful)
The same way the robots know they've finished calculating Pi.