decafjava
macrumors 603
Found this cool bit from the original Star Trek when an alien entity took over the Enterprise's computer.
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Happy Pi Day Doctor Q!
- Thread starter MacDawg
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And we have a new record!
StorageReview Lab has computed decimal pi to 202,112,290,000,000 digits. The final digit in that sequence was a 2.
It took 100 elapsed days, including continuous computation for 85 days, and used 1.5 picobytes of storage. CPU speed used to be the determinant for computation time, but this time the storage read/write speed was the limiting factor, so a faster CPU wouldn't have made any difference.
I usually celebrate achievements like this without reservation, but I just read an article about how much energy is being used for cryptocurrency mining, and now I'm wondering if the energy used to compute 202 trillion digits of pi could have been used for some other worthy purpose, like charging all of the EVs on the road.
StorageReview Lab has computed decimal pi to 202,112,290,000,000 digits. The final digit in that sequence was a 2.
It took 100 elapsed days, including continuous computation for 85 days, and used 1.5 picobytes of storage. CPU speed used to be the determinant for computation time, but this time the storage read/write speed was the limiting factor, so a faster CPU wouldn't have made any difference.
I usually celebrate achievements like this without reservation, but I just read an article about how much energy is being used for cryptocurrency mining, and now I'm wondering if the energy used to compute 202 trillion digits of pi could have been used for some other worthy purpose, like charging all of the EVs on the road.
jz0309
macrumors P6
if you think crypto is bad, look at what "genAI" will be doing, and/or is already ...
As for Pi, as a high-schooler and then college, I used to memorize ~ 15 digits, also of "e", and that was quite sufficient for everything I ever came across (but it's almost like 50 years ago 😉)
What's the most important fact about the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?
Obviously, it's that if you skip the extraneous supercalifragilisticex and alidocious portions, you're left with the important part: pi!
Obviously, it's that if you skip the extraneous supercalifragilisticex and alidocious portions, you're left with the important part: pi!
maflynn
macrumors Broadwell
When pi isn't as good as an approximation of pi
I know that most of you, like me, spend your idle time reading the government's NAVSTAR GPS Space Segment/Navigation User Segment Interfaces specifications for the Global Positioning System (GPS). This document, called IS-GPS-200 for short, has wonderfully useful tidbits of information. For example, you can use this handy formula to compute the second derivative of the clock error from an orbiting GPS satellite:
My favorite tidbit, however, is the value of pi used in section 20.3.3.4.3.2 of the specifications. It's 3.1415926535898, which is pi rounded to the 13th decimal place. GPS uses this approximation of pi to determine each satellite's antenna phase center position.
If you're implementing a GPS receiver on the ground, you need to use 3.1415926535898, rather than pi, to determine your position on the planet. If you use 3.14159265358979 (a more accurate approximation of pi) or 3.141592653590 (a less accurate approximation of pi) then your computations will be less accurate!
I know that most of you, like me, spend your idle time reading the government's NAVSTAR GPS Space Segment/Navigation User Segment Interfaces specifications for the Global Positioning System (GPS). This document, called IS-GPS-200 for short, has wonderfully useful tidbits of information. For example, you can use this handy formula to compute the second derivative of the clock error from an orbiting GPS satellite:
My favorite tidbit, however, is the value of pi used in section 20.3.3.4.3.2 of the specifications. It's 3.1415926535898, which is pi rounded to the 13th decimal place. GPS uses this approximation of pi to determine each satellite's antenna phase center position.
If you're implementing a GPS receiver on the ground, you need to use 3.1415926535898, rather than pi, to determine your position on the planet. If you use 3.14159265358979 (a more accurate approximation of pi) or 3.141592653590 (a less accurate approximation of pi) then your computations will be less accurate!
decafjava
macrumors 603
Clix Pix
macrumors Core
It's Greek to everyone since Π is the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet.
Clix Pix
macrumors Core
Gregg2
macrumors 604
Then you might not want to read the book The Universe Speaks in Numbers, but it's a fascinating read.
