Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP

cloud.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 118 posts

Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP

#91

Post by black-tea »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #32

Meh, 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…

Yeah, not particularly impressive. The main outcome of this was to give the record to a woman.

Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP

#92

Post by onlydeadheroes »

web007 wrote: post #88
ousta wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggle to see any complexity into google approach - unlike bellard's one that is an amazing feat. They basically pulled more machine to compute more. nothing really impressive. pretty much any dev with that computing power could have done it

It's fairly impressive. Keeping a single server online for 111 days straight at full CPU and RAM usage over 96 cores and 1.4TB of RAM is a good start. The fact that such a machine exists is already mind-blowing. Then add 25 more nodes running iSCSI, all out 24/7 for 111 days. Hell, just mounting 240TB on a single system is a good stunt, go ahead and try it and let me know it's not "complex". And your last point kind…

While those are interesting systems administration tasks, I believe the point is that the previous record was held by someone who used smarter maths (than the previous previous record) and vastly fewer computing resources.

Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP

#93

Post by DannyB2 »

curiousgal wrote: post #11
patrickg_zill wrote: post #8

How can you tell if the results are accurate?

Why would you need to do that? It's not like those digits are useful for anything at all.

> Why would you need to do that? It's not like those digits are useful for anything at all.

People complain about that.

But . . . why do we have athletic competitions? It's not like it is useful for anything at all.

Or Reality TV for that matter.

Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP

#94

Post by wool_gather »

DannyB2 wrote: post #90
sverige wrote: post #86

Whenever I see the ridiculous number of places to which pi has been calculated, I wonder if anyone has checked to see if there is a repeating pattern. I mean, 31 trillion places leaves a lot of possibilities for repetition of a couple of billion digits. Or is my understanding of what constitutes an irrational number outdated? Is there another definition that precludes even looking for repetition in hopes of finding a…

Not consecutively repeating patterns. But if you take any length pattern of digits, it would repeat an infinite number of times. Let's take a one digit pattern, say '5'. Since the digits of pi continue forever, there would be an infinite number of '5's. Now consider a longer pattern '53'. Since the digits of pi continue forever, there would be an infinite number of '53's. In fact, each 53 will be from one of the infi…

This is the concept of [a "normal" number][0] (which is a strange choice of word, I think). Apparently pi is not proven to be normal. But the implication as I understand is that, yes, any given sequence that you'd care to look for is there somewhere.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP

#95

Post by UncleSlacky »

skykooler wrote: post #59
hokobomo wrote: post #17

> March 14 (represented as 3/14 in many parts of the world) haha

Yeah, but we can't celebrate on the other way around, because there's no 14th month.

There's the 22nd of July (22/7), also known as Pi Approximation Day, which in any case is more accurate than 3.14.

Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP

#98

Post by stephencanon »

wool_gather wrote: post #94
DannyB2 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not consecutively repeating patterns. But if you take any length pattern of digits, it would repeat an infinite number of times. Let's take a one digit pattern, say '5'. Since the digits of pi continue forever, there would be an infinite number of '5's. Now consider a longer pattern '53'. Since the digits of pi continue forever, there would be an infinite number of '53's. In fact, each 53 will be from one of the infi…

This is the concept of [a "normal" number][0] (which is a strange choice of word, I think). Apparently pi is not proven to be normal. But the implication as I understand is that, yes, any given sequence that you'd care to look for is there somewhere. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

Almost all numbers are normal, so it seems like a perfectly reasonable choice of terminology =)

[On the other hand, almost none of the numbers someone on the street might name are normal, so ...]

Re: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP

#99

Post by hi41 »

gibspaulding wrote: post #87
sverige wrote: post #86

Whenever I see the ridiculous number of places to which pi has been calculated, I wonder if anyone has checked to see if there is a repeating pattern. I mean, 31 trillion places leaves a lot of possibilities for repetition of a couple of billion digits. Or is my understanding of what constitutes an irrational number outdated? Is there another definition that precludes even looking for repetition in hopes of finding a…

Pi can be proven to be an irrational number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrationa...

Quick question. Is 22/7 an approximate value of pie? What is the correct formula and why?
Post reply on HN