Perhaps they subliminally hope the final pages of the novel "contact" to be real
Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
31–40 of 118 posts
Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
#32Meh, throwing raw power at the problem is not that impressive.
Bellard's [1] 2009 record was much more impressive, because he used a clever formula to break the existing record with a mere (albeit beefy) desktop computer: https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/
The record he broke with his desktop PC was made using a supercomputer cluster.
[1] If somebody is not familiar with him, he is also the original author of QEMU, ffmpeg and the Tiny C Compiler.
Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
#33Don't miss the video on how Emma did this:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvEvTcXF-4Q
(length 3:14)
Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
#34How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need? (NASA/JPL): https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimal...
In short 40 is already crazy too many digits for most if not all applications. Yet in the original article they say «Granted, most scientific applications don’t need π beyond a few hundred digits, …». Is there scientific applications where they would really need more than 40? Or is it just the author making some guess?
Whether there's a use for 40 digits or 40 trillion digits, needing more accuracy is not why we find these numbers. There's no 'need' for this at all. The same way there's no 'need' to find bigger prime numbers. We're just seeing how far we can go, maybe seeing a new pattern emerge.
Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
#35Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
#36How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need? (NASA/JPL): https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimal...
In short 40 is already crazy too many digits for most if not all applications. Yet in the original article they say «Granted, most scientific applications don’t need π beyond a few hundred digits, …». Is there scientific applications where they would really need more than 40? Or is it just the author making some guess?
The linked NASA article points out that with 40 digits of pi you could compute the circumference of the visible universe to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom. I'm gonna say there's no practical application that would require even 40 digits, never mind a few hundred
Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
#37Meh, throwing raw power at the problem is not that impressive. Bellard's [1] 2009 record was much more impressive, because he used a clever formula to break the existing record with a mere (albeit beefy) desktop computer: https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/ The record he broke with his desktop PC was made using a supercomputer cluster. [1] If somebody is not familiar with him, he is also the original author of QEMU, ffm…
I don't think it's about the PI tbh, more like a pretty stunt to me
Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily. A double gets you pretty far into pi for a cost of just 8 bytes. A little bit of rounding, or checksumming, or other tomfoolery in principle should make it possible to reach absurdly far into pi for a byte or two more.
If your offset is a million digits long you need to be sending more than a million digits of data to make it worthwhile, but the chance of your chosen million digits being available in that space is effectively zero. :)
Regardless of the actual distribution of values in pi, it seems to me that the best case scenario can't compress all data on average when you include the offset and length, because of the pigeonhole principle. Same as any compression method, except practically worse/useless because pi isn't constructed to have the values that occur in practical situations come first.
Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
#39"31,415,926,535,897 to be exact, or π * 10^13" Uhm no, you mean, approximately π * 10^13.
Exactly ⌊π * 10^13⌋
Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
#40How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need? (NASA/JPL): https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimal...
I don't think anyone is claiming this is useful in any way, it's basically an advert for the stability of Google Cloud Services (apparently the VM was migrated thousands of times over the course of the computaton). It's also just kinda fun.