Why the hate? The guy has a single box somewhere and he decided to calculate this using a few CPU months and a few disks. He calculated some digits of pi probably for fun, and then let people know about it. Would it have been better for him to just let the machine be idle for those months when he wasn't using it to play World of Warcraft or whatever the latest game is? Some people tinker with old automobiles, some people knit, some people recreate 70's microcomputers. "Digits of pi" is something non-mathematicians understand; "terms of the continued fraction of pi" is probably not. I think it's cool, myself. If it leads a dozen people a greater understanding of the mathematics of how it was done, I think it is a net win. -tom On Sun, Dec 11, 2016 at 9:04 AM, Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> wrote:
Digits. Feh. What a waste of chips and neurons. The only excuse: Now that they've done it, converting to the continued fraction might be slightly easier than extracting the cf directly. But if you want both, it might be easier to extract the decimal from the cf. Or maybe not, since they probably wrote their own multiprecision routines to use base 10^19 vs 2^64 to dodge the big radix conversion cost. Or is floating point still so much faster than fixed that they sacrificed several digits per "word" to redundant exponents, like the old Mersenne finders? --rwg
Date: 2016-12-10 17:53 From: Simon Plouffe <simon.plouffe@gmail.com> To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Reply-To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com>
They made a new computation record of Pi,
http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/records.html
22 459 157 718 361 digits.
This is big.
the digits seems to be rather normal in base 10 and 16.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1612/1612.00489.pdf
also : 22.459157718361 is Pi^E.
Some explanations here : http://pi2e.ch/
best regards, Simon Plouffe _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
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