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

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

#41

Post by xpil »

isostatic wrote: post #20
hokobomo wrote: post #17

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

The US and Philippines use month-day-year. The rest of the world doesn't. The most popular format is Day-Month-Year, followed by Year-Month-Day.

My two favourite date formats are: (1) yyyy-MMM-dd and (2): yyyyMMdd.

Why?

(1) eliminates any ambiguity regarding interpretation. You can have an instance of a server of an unknown provenience and/or regional settings and still count on yyyy-MMM-dd to be correctly recognized.

(2) on the other hand has a nice feature of being sortable and can also be stored as an integer value if needed.

The US standard of MM/dd/yyyy is ridiculous. But it's just one of many and I'm not going to fix the world ;)

On the main topic: if anyone needs to calculate the circumference of the Universe (radius: 50bn lightyears ish) with the accuracy of the Planck distance (approximately 1.6 x 10^-30 meters), they need less than 65 digits of Pi to do so. So, as already stated, it's just a PR stunt, nothing more.

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

#44

Post by arethuza »

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…

And JSLinux - full PC emulation in your browser (this never ceases to amaze me no matter how often I play with it):

https://bellard.org/jslinux/

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

#45

Post by isostatic »

xpil wrote: post #41
isostatic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US and Philippines use month-day-year. The rest of the world doesn't. The most popular format is Day-Month-Year, followed by Year-Month-Day.

My two favourite date formats are: (1) yyyy-MMM-dd and (2): yyyyMMdd. Why? (1) eliminates any ambiguity regarding interpretation. You can have an instance of a server of an unknown provenience and/or regional settings and still count on yyyy-MMM-dd to be correctly recognized. (2) on the other hand has a nice feature of being sortable and can also be stored as an integer value if needed. The US standard of MM/dd/yyyy…

yyyy-MM-dd is sortable (2019-03-14)

yyyy-MMM-dd is not (2019-MAR-14)

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

#46

Post by klohto »

WilliamEdward wrote: post #34
StreakyCobra wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The same way there's no 'need' to find bigger prime numbers.

From cryptography standpoint, there is always a need to find bigger prime number. I wouldn't compare this with a Pi.

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

#47

Post by klohto »

StreakyCobra wrote: post #23
hokobomo wrote: post #17

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

I wanted to comment the same part, but I wanted to let them the benefit of the doubt, so I went to Wikipedia «date format by country» page [1], and summed up from the table how many people have "MD" vs "DM" in their date format: DM -> 3392/5550 ~= 61.1% MD -> 2158/5550 ~= 38.9% Note: I ignored both green and red regions that have both "DM" and "MD" in their format. So it is definitively not the majority of people. Us…

But that is population not a number of countries. If you look at it from a country perspective, the percentage is tiny.

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

#48

Post by LinuxBender »

wetpaws wrote: post #37
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…

I don't think it's about the PI tbh, more like a pretty stunt to me

They did it so I could say,

There are three kinds of mathematicians, those that can count and those that can not.

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

#49

Post by StreakyCobra »

klohto wrote: post #47
StreakyCobra wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to comment the same part, but I wanted to let them the benefit of the doubt, so I went to Wikipedia «date format by country» page [1], and summed up from the table how many people have "MD" vs "DM" in their date format: DM -> 3392/5550 ~= 61.1% MD -> 2158/5550 ~= 38.9% Note: I ignored both green and red regions that have both "DM" and "MD" in their format. So it is definitively not the majority of people. Us…

But that is population not a number of countries. If you look at it from a country perspective, the percentage is tiny.

Probably. The statement talk about "parts of the world", and this concept of "parts" can be seen as countries, continents, surface of earth, atoms, etc. I chose to reduce it to the smallest meaningful entity concerning the concept of dates: humans. It is arbitrary, but justifiable :)

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

#50

Post by XorNot »

klohto wrote: post #46
WilliamEdward wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The same way there's no 'need' to find bigger prime numbers. From cryptography standpoint, there is always a need to find bigger prime number. I wouldn't compare this with a Pi.

Finding a change in the behavior of Pi that emerges at high precisions would be a significant discovery.
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