News - Two quadrillionth digit of Pi calculated

[HEXUS]

Yahoo researcher spends 23 days with 1,000 computers - and the number is...

Read more.

[Tattysnuc]

I don't believe them. Ask them to prove it.

[watercooled]

Wow that's pretty impressive. I'm surprised no-one has bothered to break the record on a large cluster, at least for some time.
The previous record is 5 trillion BTW, calculated on a single workstation: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=221773

Edit: Oh after reading it properly, they haven't actually calculated two quadrillion digits, so the previous record still stands. I was pretty surprised by the huge number at first.

[BullDogg]

I predict the 3 quadillionth number to be....7.

I challenge anyone to prove me wrong

[streetster]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the seventeen-quadrillionth digit of Pi is a 3.

10% chance of getting it right until someone proves me wrong

[e!] - Argh didn't see BullDogg's post with the exact same theme. balls.

[borandi]

For those who are interested, the two-quadrillionth digit of Pi is 0.

Nicholas Sze, of technology firm Yahoo, determined that the digit - when expressed in binary - is 0.

When expressed as binary? So it's either a 0 or a 1.

[BullDogg]

When expressed as binary? So it's either a 0 or a 1.

If that's the case, which it is, because I believe the BBC, it took 1000 computers 23 days to come up with a number that I had a 50% chance of correctly guessing?

Mathematics...practical as ever.

[Botia]

It was a 50/50 chance. I would have guessed 1. Guess I was wrong.

[watercooled]

So it's only the two hundred and fifty trillionth denary digit? Wouldn't a whole digit have been more useful?

[this_is_gav]

Hope they did a memtest first.

[watercooled]

Haha, there are ways of verifying a pi calculation but I'm not sure about doing it only to a small portion of numbers like this.

[Fraz]

Hadoop, not Hardoop.

I was thinking that map-reduce seemed like an odd way of doing it. Must be some quite clever maths. Still, what a waste of CPU power. If I had 1000 computers for 23 days, I'd do something much more useful.

[watercooled]

Like play Crysis.

[matty-hodgson]

Fold, and overtake Lowe .

[bob75]

If I had 1000 computers for 23 days, I'd do something much more useful.

Boinc with Rosetta@home!!

[ploo]

The amount of points you could rack in on folding@home with that amount of processing power...