adrian@ru-cs44.UUCP (01/20/84)
Can anybody tell me to how many places pi has been calculated, and
by whom?
Ta
Adrian Pell ({vax135,mcvax}!ukc!ru-cs44!adrian)
Dept of Computer Science
University of Reading
England
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Adrian Pell ({vax135,mcvax,edcaad}!ukc!ru-cs44!adrian)
Computer Science Dept.
University of Reading
UKchongo@nsc.UUCP (Landon Noll) (01/26/84)
as of late, 16,000,000 digits of pi existed on a disk file of a major Univeristy on the east coast of the US. the person who generated this result was interested in testing how well Fast Fourier Transform Multiplication worked on numbers of that size. the test showed that FFT multiplication worked well for large numbers. the person, who is well known in the Number Theory community, did not want to publish his result. (there is a stigma about folks who 'spend' their time looking for pi...) according to the person, the 16,000,000th digit is 8. i dont know if a larger result has been found, but since the number was distroyed and nor reported, you cant call it very official. there exist Cray 1 programs which can crack out the first 4Meg digits in less than 7 hours of cpu time. should anyone spend even 1% of the computation power that has been spent on some Plasma Physics or factoring problems, pi would be known to a very large number of digits. the lack of this happening indicates a lack of interest and value of the problem in some circles. chongo <3.14159...> /\pp/\ p.s. the best value if pi, is just 'pi'. :-)