26 ms·
Pi calculation world record with over 202T digits
- Someone 2y agoI guess they were sponsored by their hardware manufacturers, on the condition that they mentioned their name once for every trillionth digit of pi they computed. I can understand that they have to mention them, but I think they’re overdoing it.
- ycombinete 2y agoThe StorageReview Lab Team would never do that.
- lifeisstillgood 2y agoNah this is a hardware review magazine - it’s like asking Jeremy Clarkson to stop say “Lamborghini” so often :-)
- netsharc 2y agoOnly 11 hits, 10 of them in the beginning and end bits, which were probably written by the marketing team (and ChatGPT). It'd probably be amusing to ask ChatGPT to rewrite the article so that every sentence contains "StorageReview Lab"...
- egberts1 2y agoThis new pi value should land us on the precise nanometer on a planetary rock of a sun located some 18 trillion light years away. More than good enough for a Star Trek transporter targeting system, provided that sufficient power can reach it and able to compensate for planetary orbital speed, orbital curvature, surface axial rate, as well same value set for its solar system pathway around its galaxy, and its galaxy pathway thru its eyewatery cornucopia of galaxies. But it may not be good enough for precise calculation of field interaction within a large group of elementary particles of quantum physics. Thanks to Heisenburg’s Indeterminacy Principle (aka Uncertainty Principle).
- slyall 2y ago> This new pi value should land us on the precise nanometer on a planetary rock of a sun located about 18 trillion light years away. 40 digits or so will get you that...
- hughesjj 2y agoNah, observable universe is only 93B light years in "diameter" at the current "moment"
- theandrewbailey 2y ago93 billion light years is 8.798×10^26 meters[0], so about 35 digits ought to suffice for any given nanometer. [0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=93+billion+light+years+in+meters https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=93+billion+light+years+...
- egberts1 2y agoNow that's a solid win for us math nerds.
- constantcrying 2y agoIn floating point arithmetic two consecutive operations can have an unbounded error. Just because the precision is good enough for one computation doesn't mean it is good enough for all computations.
- egberts1 2y agoVery good. Here's the WolframAlpha equation to your assertion of 40-digit ... or so. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28180+x+17+trillion+light+years%29%2F%28pi+x1nm%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28180+x+17+trillion+li...
- SushiHippie 2y agoPardon my ignorance, but what does this calculate?
- gizajob 2y agoAnd on only 2400 watts too. Impressive.
- voxadam 2y agoWatts are a measure of instantaneous power, wouldn't the number of Watt-hours (or kW⋅h) be more interesting in this context?
- roflmaostc 2y ago2400 Watts times 85 days
- euroderf 2y agoAbout 4900 kWh. A few hundred bucks of EL ? Maybe more than a grand ? And prices-per-digit so low we're practically giving them away !
- gizajob 2y agoInteresting in that it’s not a Cray or a mainframe, chugging megawatts for weeks on end to do the same thing.
- theginger 2y agoIf we are all living in a simulation there may have been an extremely stressed cosmic sys admin racing to make sure we did not get into an overflow situation.
- Throw83839 2y ago"Cosmic sys admin" can terminate any misbehaving "process" that consumes too many resources. Matrix will protect itself, even if it would take a murder!
- malux85 2y ago"even if" is generous, I am kill -9 crazy if stability is even slightly threatened
- stingraycharles 2y agoUnfortunately looking at the job requirements for a "Cosmic sys admin", it looks like the universe was written in PHP after all. https://www.cosmicdevelopment.com/careers/system-admin/ https://www.cosmicdevelopment.com/careers/system-admin/
- throwaway211 2y agoPi's a trick that was invented to keep us busy. That or integers were and we should have an natural number of fingers and toes.
- smitty1e 2y ago
- RamblingCTO 2y agoAs pi never repeats itself, that also means that every piece of conceivable information (music, movies, texts) is in there, encoded. So as we have so many pieces of pi now, we could create a file sharing system that's not based on sharing the data, but the position of a piece of the file in pi. That would be kinda funny
- sammex 2y agoWould the index number actually be smaller than the actual data?
- psychoslave 2y agoYou need both index and length, I guess. If concatenating both value is not enough to gain sufficient size shrink, you can always prefix a "number of times still needed to recursively de-index (repeat,start-point-index,size) concatenated triplets", and repeat until you match a desired size or lower. I don’t know if there would be any logical issue with this approach. The only logistical difficulty I can figure out is computing enough decimals and search the pattern in it, but I guess that such a voluminous pre-computed approximation can greatly help.
- waldrews 2y agoNo invertible function can map every non-negative integer to a lower or equal non-negative integer (no perfect compression), but you can have functions that compress everything we care about at the cost of increasing the size of things we don't care about. So the recursive de-indexing strategy has to sometimes fail and increase the cost (once you account for storing the prefix).
- psychoslave 2y agoIs there some inductive proof of that? Or is that some conjuncture? Actually any resources related to that point could be fun to explore
- waldrews 2y agoWhy go through all that effort, when it's just tau/2.
- maxmouchet 2y agoNice achievement but always a bit disappointing that those records are based on throwing more money at the problem, rather than new theoretical grounds, or software improvements (IIRC y-cruncher is not open source).
- vasco 2y agoThis reminds me I've been curious to know what Hackernews people walk around with. I memorized 18 digits of Pi in highschool that I still remember and sometimes use as a bad joke here and there. But curious how many digits people here walk around remembering, specially if you aren't into competitively doing it (which I found out later is a thing).
- heinrich5991 2y ago18 including the leading 3.
- contravariant 2y agoI remember up to around 3.14159265, which is roughly what most cheap calculators will show you.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y agoLikewise. I just memorized what my 10 digit calculator showed me in high school.
- rossant 2y agoI memorized 20 digits when I was 11 or 12. I still remember them.
- GeoAtreides 2y agoThere is a streamer who memorised 1000 digits of pi, on stream, from scratch, in 11 hours. She used the mind palace method. Here's the whole vod, if curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZqTIXCrC3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZqTIXCrC3g
- wruza 2y agoSurprised it’s not Matt, although he’d probably misremember one digit anyway.
- goodcanadian 2y ago
- scoot 2y agoI'm curious what the longest string of digits of PI embedded in that is (and what the most efficient algorithm for finding it would be).
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y agoDid you write down all the digits? Excellent.
- classified 2y ago[flagged]
- ergonaught 2y agoThe context you omitted explains what they meant by "largest known digit", but I guess you were trying to be funny? > The largest known digit of Pi is 2, at position 202,112,290,000,000 (two hundred two trillion, one hundred twelve billion, two hundred ninety million).
- classified 2y agoBut the digit 9 is larger than the digit 2, and the first 202 trillion digits of Pi aren't made up of just 0, 1, and 2??? Are you trying to be funny?
- ptsneves 2y agoAre there well interesting formulas where PI is potentiated? This would affect the importance of the precision of PI's digits if i understand correctly.
- boringg 2y agoHave they empirically checked that there is no pattern reproduction or just going by the proof? I imagine since this is the largest we've calculated to you could also empirically check the proof to confirm accuracy.
- hughesjj 2y agoThere's a series expansion for arbitrary digits of pi (but in hex) that you could sample https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93Plouffe_formula https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80...
- m3kw9 2y agoHow do they verify that because even if it’s as simple as addition, you may have hardware anomalies that appears, just look at divisions and floating points weirdness on certain hardware
- meroes 2y agoIt ran on their machine
- NeoTar 2y agoThere are techniques which allow you to, for instance, calculate the 'n'th digit of Pi in base 10 (or binary, or hex, etc.) These are generally more computationally/memory expensive than the techniques used to calculate as many digits of Pi as possible. So, you run your big calculation to get all XXX trillion digits on one machine, and run a completely different calculation to check, say, 1000 of those digits. If all match it's a pretty convincing argument that the calculation is correct.
- chj 2y agoIs it possible to find a certain encoded formula of PI inside the PI digits itself, given its length?
- lqet 2y agoDo you mean in the computed 202T digits of Pi, on in in the infinite sequence of Pi digits? In case of the latter: s̶u̶r̶e̶, probably, if Pi is normal, any finite sequence of digits is contained somewhere in Pi, so it would contain (in encoded form) any closed formula and any program, book, or piece of music ever written. E: As the comments have pointed out, this requires the conjecture that Pi is normal to be true, was has not been proven or disproven yet.
- jagthebeetle 2y agoI thought this wasn't actually mathematically established - the related property would be whether or not pi is normal.
- Q_is_4_Quantum 2y agoIs this known to be true? Its obviously not true for arbitrary irrational numbers
- chj 2y agoI meant the computed digits. Probably unlikely
- gigatexal 2y agoAnyone else thinking a few nodes of those servers with their drool-worthy 60TB ssds in a HA environment would be really really awesome to play with and run infra on so I could go back to not worrying about cloud spend and just focus on cool and fun stuff?
- WalterBright 2y agoMy roommate in college had, while in high school, gone for a Guinness World Record memorizing the number of digits in pi. He memorized them out to 800 or so, then discovered another had memorized it to thousands, so he gave up. In college, he figured out how to write a program to compute an arbitrary number of the digits of Pi. I asked him how did he know it was correct? He said "just look at it. The digits are right!" We were limited in the use of the campus PDP-10 by a CPU time allotment per semester. He was planning to blow his allotment computing pi, he figured he could compute it to 15,000 digits or so. At the end of the term, he fired it up to run overnight. The PDP-10 crashed sometime in the early morning, and his allotment was used up and had no results! He just laughed and gave up the quest. Later on, Caltech lifted the limits on PDP-10 usage. Which was a good thing, because Empire consumed a lot of CPU resources :-/
- smokel 2y agoThe limits on memorizing digits of pi have been lifted to great heights by Akira Haraguchi [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Haraguchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Haraguchi
- patriksvensson 2y agoInteresting: Despite Haraguchi's efforts and detailed documentation, the Guinness World Records have not yet accepted any of his records set.
- NobodyNada 2y agoGuiness is not an "authentic" record-keeping organization, in that they largely don't attempt to maintain accurate records of "the most X" and "the fastest Y". Rather, their business model is primarily based on marketing and publicity stunts: a company makes a ridiculously large pizza or whatever, and pays a very large amount of money to have Guinness "verify" their record for biggest pizza. A Guinness world record is just Guinness's record; it's commonly different from the true world record. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_World_Records#Change_in_business_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_World_Records#Change_...
- fritzo 2y agoAny signs of Sagan's conjectured graffiti yet? E.g. pictures of circles?
- 725686 2y agoBut why? Serious question. I'm sure something interesting/useful might come out of it, and even if it doesn't just go for it, but is there any mathematical truth that can be gleaned by calculating pi to more and more digits?
- xyst 2y agoLike cryptography algos use prime numbers. Probably something out there that uses pi digits.
- sweezyjeezy 2y agoNot particularly, only thing I can think of is if we analysed it and saw there was some bias in the digits, but no one expects that (pi should be a 'normal number' [1]). I think they did it as a flex of their hardware. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number
- robxorb 2y agoIsn't there a non-zero chance that given an infinite number of digits, the probability of finding repeats of pi, each a bit longer, increases until a perfect, endless repeat of pi will eventually be found thus nullifying pi's own infinity?
- Antipode 2y agoThe chance of that loop repeating forever is 0.
- robxorb 2y agoInfinity has entered the chat.
- kevinventullo 2y agoIn this case, the infinite sum 0+0+0+0+… is still zero.
- xyst 2y ago202 trillion digits of pi. Maybe someday I will be able to use this exact calculation to do something useful. Just need 61TB of memory or disk space to store the constant
- philip1209 2y agoIt’s way to dismiss this as useless. But, I feel like doing this work must have yielded some interesting second-order tools or realizations. So, does anybody know what interesting discoveries have come out of this process, besides a more precise Pi?
- 2o35j2o3j 2y agoThey need to keep going. I heard there's a surprise about 10^20 digits in.
- SloopJon 2y agoI was shopping for a storage array last year, and was impressed by the IBM FlashSystem, which can stuff about 1.8PB (raw) into a 4U enclosure using forty-eight 38.4TB FlashCore modules. StorageReview's server is a different beast, but it's kind of amazing that it gets similar capacity in only 2U.
- bitslayer 2y agoMeh. About as useless as blockchain, I guess.
- mrlonglong 2y agoEven NASA doesn't need to use more than 17 digits, more than enough to slice an atom into half across the entire universe.
- asdfasvea 2y agoI've never understood why people have such a hard-on for the digits of pi. I've met more than one pi braggart who expected me to marvel at their ability to recite digits, but couldn't answer 'what is pi though? Don't use numbers, use words'. And they just didn't know. It's one of those weird domains we're people can possess deep knowledge and no understanding.
- redditor98654 2y agoI know human curiosity is a big reason why we pursue hard things in life. But can anyone tell me why this specific problem has been pushed to such limits. What is the utility here?