A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi - and a few digits either side of it.
Nicholas Sze, of technology firm Yahoo, determined that the digit - when expressed in binary - is 0.
Mr Sze used Yahoo's Hadoop cloud computing technology to more than double the previous record. The computation took 23 days on 1,000 of Yahoo's computers, racking up the equivalent of more than 500 years of a single computer's efforts.
J_RaD
11:53 pm on Sep 16, 2010 (gmt 0)
isn't that just called a cluster?
oh yea thats right "cloud computing" is the cool term these days.
lammert
3:18 am on Sep 17, 2010 (gmt 0)
The computation took 23 days on 1,000 of Yahoo's computers, racking up the equivalent of more than 500 years of a single computer's efforts.
Let's see how my small 1 bit calulator performs: 23 days of 1000 computers is 23000 computer days, which is the equivalent of 23000/365 = 63 years. I don't need a computing cluster to see that this calculation is way off.
kaled
9:41 am on Sep 17, 2010 (gmt 0)
Is there a Guinness World Record for the most pointless use of CPU time?
Perhaps the next calculation should be how many Kilograms of CO2 are required per million digits to calculate pi.
Also, what's wrong with e (base of natural logarithms) or the square root of two (or three). Could it possibly be that there is less publicity value to these numbers.
Kaled.
john_k
7:32 pm on Sep 17, 2010 (gmt 0)
Nicholas Sze, of tech firm Yahoo, said that when pi is expressed in binary, the two quadrillionth digit is 0.
So it's not the 2 quadrillionth decimal digit expressed in binary, but the 2 quadrillionth binary digit of the binary expression. I am thinking that even if you just guess the odds of getting the correct digit are 50-50.
