How I wish I could calculate PI, really tried but failed
That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation
Emma Haruka Iwao, a developer advocate at Google Cloud, has celebrated Pi Day (3/14) by setting a new Guinness World Record for calculations of the beautiful mathematical constant, reaching a number with more than 31.4 trillion (ha!) digits. Researchers have been competing to calculate the most digits of Pi for years – often …
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Thursday 14th March 2019 21:44 GMT Frumious Bandersnatch
Re: Pi day
Japan uses month-day. But then, they have symbols 月 and 日 tacked onto the numbers to signify month and day, respectively. Of course, they don't use something as stupid as mm-dd-yy, as you mentioned.
For the full three-part date, the only things that should be considered are big-endian (Japan, which also has 年 to go with 月日) or little-endian (pretty much everyone else) and not some idiotic random order.
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Thursday 14th March 2019 16:32 GMT BlartVersenwaldIII
Re: Pi day
Some of us like the nice ISO date format... yyyy-MM-dd; it has the advantages of both sorting lexically and being unambiguous to people used to either MM/dd/yy or dd/MM/yy. After dealing with Hilarious Misunderstandings thanks to left/rightpondian misinterpretations I put on my benevolent dictator hat and got all us techies to standardise on ISO format instead on pain of death (or at least making the tea for a week).
As a bonus for those of us who prefer it and use linux, ls has inbuilt support for using it via the --time-style=long-iso option, add it to your alias file today!
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Thursday 14th March 2019 13:09 GMT Chris Miller
I wonder how much that would have cost commercially. Would it have been cheaper to buy a supercomputer?
Iwao has been interested in the famous irrational number from an early age.
Not merely irrational (like root 2), but transcendental, as proved by von Lindemann in 1882.
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Thursday 14th March 2019 14:21 GMT Charlie Clark
I think the point is that, no it would not have been cheaper to buy a supercomputer. This is a single, highly specialised algorithm, so not necessarily directly comparable with the stuff running on supercomputers. But the speed and price are only, er, part of the equation: with a supercomputer you normally have extremely fast networking and storage for data going in and out.
Still, you can see that we're probably only a couple of generations from being able to rent say a supercomputer rack complete with dedicated glass fibre link. And in the meantime you can develop and test algorithms for that spanking new machine while you're waiting for it to be built.
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Thursday 14th March 2019 14:00 GMT richardcox13
Seems a lot of work when they could have just asked a colleague
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Thursday 14th March 2019 17:23 GMT Grizzerly
I've been retired from the industry for many years, but I love this story! The sheer joy of doing something like this just for the hell of it is great. As long as there are people who will do things like this, there is hope for humanity. Especially if there are publications which will head the story "That's Numberwang!".
Keep up the good work!
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Monday 18th March 2019 14:08 GMT Benchops
Eric Morecombe reciting digits of Pi to André Previn:
"zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ..."